It’s a flat world. The Synthetic Realities of Sora

AI video generation models such as Open AI’s Sora make it possible to create ultra-realistic animations from scratch and seamlessly merge disparate visual content into new synthetic media. For its developers, however, Sora seems more than just a tool; they rather see it as a “world simulator.” But if Sora, trained on online video content scraped from YouTube or generated by game engines such as Unreal, is supposed to simulate a world, what world is it? As the short essay argues, it is a world of constant modulation and endless flows of patterns—a flat world, the world of platform capitalism.