Open AI shuts down Sora

Open AI announced on Tuesday, March 24 that it was shutting down SORA, the slop machine that spit out short generated video clips. ^[1] It is used by some to make dumb or silly short-form content, but used by many others to create deceptive material used to influence, promote, and profit from scams and political interference.

Disney announced at the same time that it was backing out of it’s pledged $1 Billion investment in OpenAI. I can’t help but notice that the timing of both of these non-trivial announcements are rapid exits from the AI space. Obviously not complete exits for either, but suspiciously rapid when literal BILLIONS of dollars are being pumped into OpenAI.

This comes just days after Microsoft announced that it was reversing course on insisting on inflicting it’s own bad, lame AI, CoPilot, on Windows users, since 2023, by shoving it into just about every single application it owns.^[2] It said it’s initially pulling CoPilot from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad because ‘users don’t want Copilot crammed into as many Windows apps as possible’.

Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s President of Windows & Devices, couched it as only wanting CoPilot ‘entry points’ that were genuinely useful. Sycophants online have begun making excuses for the shift citing ensuring stability. The only problem with that is that Micro$lop has become notorious for releasing unstable and buggy patches in it’s regular Tuesday deliveries to fix operating system’s issues. Just last week their Tuesday patch broke some user’s ability to reach the internet, with their computers telling them to connect to a network before trying to browse, when they were clearly already connected.

It’s unclear how much more Microsoft will remove CoPilot from the Windows operating system, and if they’ll go further to remove it from their Office applications. Those applications have been having their own problems with CoPilot when more than one of them is open at a time. It seems CoPilot can’t handle that too well. CoPilot itself has been getting Microsoft in the crosshairs of many users recently when it was discovered that it was gathering and sending much more telemetry from applications not associated CoPilot, as well as sensitive data from the applications burdened with this AI garbage agent.

This all underscores, once again, that these days, when it comes to software, including your operating system, you don’t own anything. Corporations will inflict non-consensual changes to the very way your computer operates by adding or removing not just features or applications, but portions of your data, at will. The disenfranchisement their terms of service and licenses contain are egregious and most of us just take it because of the tiny bit of friction of moving to another operating system. The truth is most end users do not need Windows on their PC, there are mature, stable Linux options that now operate very much like Windows.

If what’s happening at this intersection of technology and your interactions with it concerns you or just annoys you then it’s time to make that change. If you have applications that only work on Windows (or Mac, Apple isn’t blameless either), then please take a look at Linus operating systems like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Zorin OS for starters. They’re all designed to make the transition much easier. They’re all free and stable. Things to check if you have these on your Windows install:

1. Firewall and Antivirus programs like Bitdefender or Avast.
2. Graphic design, video editing, and drawing/painting programs like Photoshop or Clip Studio.

Have something to add to the conversation? Comment below, but keep it nice, that’s generally my only rule.