After OpenAI launched the Sora app in September, Sam Altman predicted that society was about to undergo a stunning artistic revolution. “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion,” he wrote online. But such a revolution never materialized. It’s not that people hate AI slop. In fact, if anything, people seem to have a surprising appetite for it—the latest TikTok trend is raunchy telenovelas starring AI-generated fruit. In response to a request for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to a public statement that cites “compute demand” as a key factor in the company’s decision. Generating videos is much more costly than generating text is, and Sora has likely been a real financial drain: In the fall, Forbes estimated that Sora might be costing OpenAI millions of dollars daily, and Bill Peebles, who leads Sora, said that the economics were “completely unsustainable.” (OpenAI declined to comment on Forbes’s estimates at the time.)