Really, it’s almost unfair to hold a tech company to its mission statement. From Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” to WeWork’s “Elevate the World’s Consciousness,” mission statements are usually written in a company’s adolescence, at that awkward moment when their dreams stretch to the horizon, the venture capitalists are all smiles, and no one has heard of the term “fiduciary responsibility.” It’s like judging someone based on the sentiments expressed in the back of their high school yearbook.

But OpenAI, you are pushing it.

Navigate to the company’s About page, and you’ll still read these words, which first appeared in its 2018 charter, three years after its founding: “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are generally smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity.” It is, to say the least, not something they’ve always lived up to, as some of Future Perfect’s coverage of the company has demonstrated. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Look, if you’d asked me what my mission statement was when I was 3 years old, it probably would have been, “Become the first NBA player to land on Mars.” We don’t always achieve what we set out to do. Priorities change, you don’t grow to 7-foot-2, it turns out you’re scared of space — you know what I mean.

But with its latest product — the AI-generated video social network Sora 2 — OpenAI may have set the all-time record for greatest distance between mission statement and actual work.

Infinite servings of AI slop

The best way to understand Sora 2 is that it marries perhaps the worst aspect of large language........

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