OpenAI Launches a Video App and Says It Will Put Ads in ChatGPT

Sora 2, released as a TikTok-style app of AI-generated clips, let people insert themselves and others into videos, reviving fights over likeness and copyright. In the same stretch, OpenAI signaled it would begin showing advertising — a turn for a company that had sold subscriptions.

OpenAI released Sora 2 this week, not as a tool buried in ChatGPT but as its own app, built like TikTok: a feed of short AI-generated videos you scroll through, with a feature that lets you drop yourself — or, with permission, a friend — into a clip as a character. It was the company's bid for a consumer hit beyond the chatbot, and it worked, briefly topping the app charts.

It also revived every fight the technology has. Users generated videos of copyrighted characters and dead celebrities; rights holders and families objected; OpenAI shifted, within days, from letting copyright holders opt out to requiring them to opt in. The likeness feature raised the obvious worry about putting words in real people's mouths.

Running alongside was a quieter but larger shift: reporting and company signals that OpenAI would begin showing advertising in ChatGPT. For three years the company sold subscriptions and access, and positioned itself against the ad-driven model of the social-media era. Advertising is what you do when you have a very large free audience and need to make money from it — and ChatGPT has one of the largest audiences ever assembled. It is also, critics noted immediately, the model that shaped everything people came to dislike about the last era of the internet.

Both moves point the same way. The company that led the AI era on the strength of a research demonstration is now doing the ordinary things large consumer companies do: chasing a viral app, and selling ads. Whether that funds the mission or bends it is the question its own employees have asked before.