The reason why Sora isn't gaining traction is pretty human

Nov 12, 2025

OpenAI haven’t made the AI video Sora app available in Australia yet, so I haven’t had an opportunity to play around with it yet (and, frankly, I don’t have the time to devote any brain power to a workaround… there’s always a workaround). That said, it hasn’t entirely gripped the world in the way I assumed it would have by now. Sora isn’t an immediate household name.

Katie Notopoulos at Business Insider has a good piece today explaining why that might be. As she notes, the really compelling feature is the ability to create videos starring friends and not just celebrities doing goofy things.

And that’s a non-starter for the majority of people:

To me, the friend graph was the key: videos of my friends were funny; everything else was just slop. If I wanted to create or watch ambient AI videos that just “look cool,” I could go to (shudder) Meta’s Vibes.
But the friend graph never expanded — at least for me — past an initial handful of early adopters. None of my friends who don’t work in tech or media ever joined, and if I’ve tried to explain Sora to them, they are horror-stricken at the idea of letting strangers make videos of their faces.

But just because I’m over Sora for now, I don’t think that means the app is a flop or that other people aren’t finding lots of uses for it. There are a huge number of people who want to use a high-quality, easy-to-use, and most importantly, free AI video app. They may be using it for all sorts of things other than “sending jokes to friends.”

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