OpenAI dropped Sora demos last week and my timeline split cleanly in two: people who said "creativity is dead" and people who said "creativity just got democratized." Both camps are wrong, and both are right, and I am going to need more coffee to explain why.
For those who missed it: Sora is an AI model that generates photorealistic video from text prompts. A woman walking through Tokyo in the snow. A woolly mammoth stomping across a tundra. Aerial shots of coastal cities that look indistinguishable from drone footage. It is stunning. It is also terrifying. Both of those things can be true simultaneously.
The death of creativity is greatly exaggerated.
Every time a new tool emerges that automates some part of the creative process, people declare the death of craft. Photography was supposed to kill painting. Photoshop was supposed to kill photography. Canva was supposed to kill graphic design. In every case, the tool democratized access to a medium while simultaneously raising the bar for what constitutes exceptional work within it.
Sora will not kill video production. It will kill mediocre video production. If your competitive advantage was "we can produce adequate stock-footage-quality video," then yes, you have a problem. But if your competitive advantage was taste, narrative structure, emotional resonance, and strategic intent, you just got a faster horse.
Where the brand strategy world should be paying attention:
The real disruption is not in production quality. It is in production volume. When it costs effectively nothing to generate video content, everyone will generate video content. The internet is already drowning in AI-generated images. AI video will make that flood look like a trickle.
This means two things for brands:
First, differentiation will come from ideas, not execution quality. When everyone can make a beautiful video, beautiful is no longer a differentiator. Smart is. Surprising is. True is. The strategic thinking behind a piece of content becomes the only scarce resource.
Second, the brands that win will be the ones that develop a genuine visual language so distinctive that their content is recognizable whether it was made by AI, by a human, or by some hybrid of both. Think about how you can spot a Wes Anderson frame or an Apple product shot. That kind of visual consistency becomes a competitive moat when production tools are commoditized.
My honest reaction:
I watched the Sora demos and felt the same vertigo I felt the first time I saw ChatGPT write decent copy. A little fear. A little excitement. And then a settling into the realization that my job was never really about the execution anyway. It was about knowing what to say and why to say it. The tools just got faster. The thinking still has to be good.
And then a settling into the realization that my job was never really about the execution anyway.
For now, I am going to keep doing what I always do: watching cultural moments, asking why, and connecting dots. Whether the final output is written by me, generated by AI, or some combination of both matters less than whether the strategic insight underneath it is sound.
The machine can make the video. It still cannot tell you what the video should mean.