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How to Unblock OpenAI’s Sora 2 If You’re Outside the US and Canada

by admin October 10, 2025

If you’re all about making next-level and viral content, you’ve very likely heard the whispering around Sora 2 that is the newest AI from OpenAI that’s literally conjuring out wild ideas into cinematic short movies from straight off the phone. It doesn’t just spit out video clips from text prompts – the new physics engine makes movements believable and the dialogue actually syncs with lips in real time. The best part? Cameo lets you star in your own AI productions with your own face and voice as if you hired a Hollywood VFX team.

But here’s the catch: Sora 2 is locked down to users in the US and Canada for now. If you’re anywhere else, you’ll hit that dead-end “not available in your region” screen, and trust me, the FOMO is real. OpenAI is keeping things tight while they fine-tune safety and sort out moderation—as explained in their official docs—but young creators worldwide are hungry for access and swapping hacks in group chats. French tech sites like Journal du Geek, German blogs, and even TikTokers in Tokyo are all sharing tricks to break through the geoblock and get Sora 2 working outside North America. So yes, no matter where you are, local nerds are on it.

All About the Hype Around Sora 2

Sora 2 is not only an upgrade but the complete redo for AI video: Scenes are realistic; you throw the ball, and the ball really bounces naturally. Street sounds, background chatter, even explosions synchronize what you’re seeing on the screen and you can edit videos with friends directly from the iOS app. The Cameo is the end all feature, where you get to appear in scenes by simply uploading the selfie and voice recording. Now you’re riding the wave off Hawaii or rapping aliens on Mars even though the reality is you recorded you from the safety of the bedroom.

For now, OpenAI is only letting North Americans in and partly to keep a handle on moderation and to test for issues before letting the rest of the world unleash creative chaos. That makes sense, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably itching to bypass the wall.

Begin by getting the good VPN that’s got quick US servers; all the devs have the ones national tech reviewers like Journal du Geek in France would advise but any good VPN is fine (we’d recommend NordVPN though, you can read a full review here). Hook the iPhone up to the US server and done—the App Store, OpenAI, all the rest—that’ll believe you’re relaxing out in Texas or LA. Now you make the new Apple ID with “United States” region. Sign out from the old one on the phone, sign out with this one and you’re good to download Sora 2 straight from the App Store.

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The one last step: scoring an invitation to Sora 2. It’s still invite-only, like the Clubhouse’s early days but drops are frequent on the OpenAI Discord. Get on, be respectful in the Sora chat and the members likely have extras to give away. Once you score yours, open the Sora application, connect up with your OpenAI account, and then you’re good to experiment.

It’s worth doing if you’re in Paris, Sydney, or Berlin, since tech sites all over the world have done play-by-play so you’ll tune up for localization eccentricities. The ultimate tools are VPN, US Apple ID, and an invitation code: no creepy downloads, no far-out scripts. After the gate, test out Sora’s new physics, chat up with Cameo, and see why teens and creators around the world are obsessed.

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October 10, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

OpenAI’s New Sora App Lets You Deepfake Yourself for Entertainment

by admin October 2, 2025

On Tuesday, OpenAI released an AI video app called Sora. The platform is powered by OpenAI’s latest video generation model, Sora 2, and revolves around a TikTok-like For You page of user-generated clips. This is the first product release from OpenAI that adds AI-generated sounds to videos. For now, it’s available only on iOS and requires an invite code to join.

“You are about to enter a creative world of AI-generated content,” reads an advisory page displayed during the app sign-up process. “Some videos may depict people you recognize, but the actions and events shown are not real.”

OpenAI is betting that creating and sharing AI deepfakes will become a popular form of entertainment. Whether it’s your friends, influencers, or random strangers online, Sora frames generating deepfake videos as a form of scrollable fun. The app’s main feed is an endless serving of bite-size AI slop featuring human faces.

During the set-up process, users are given the option to create a digital likeness of themselves by saying a few numbers aloud and turning their head around as the app records. “The team worked very hard on character consistency,” wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog about Sora’s release.

People have the ability to choose who can use their digital likeness in Sora videos. It can be set to everyone or limited to just yourself, those you approve, or mutual connections on the app. Whenever someone generates a video using your likeness, even if it’s just sitting in their drafts, you can see the full clip from your account’s page.

First Impressions

Many of the most-liked videos on my For You feed on Tuesday afternoon featured Altman’s likeness. One AI-generated clip depicted the OpenAI CEO stealing a graphics processing unit from Target. When the character gets caught, a voice that sounds like Altman’s pleads with a security guard to let him keep the GPU so that he can build AI tools.

Many of the videos generated during WIRED’s testing included rough edges and other errors. But Sora makes it incredibly seamless to create personalized deepfakes that often look and sound convincingly real.

To incorporate the likenesses of people in your videos, just tap on their faces on Sora’s generation page and add them as “cameos.” Then, enter a simple prompt, like “fight in the office over a WIRED story.”

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October 2, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

OpenAI’s new video generation tool Sora 2 is here, but don’t worry, Sam Altman says it will avoid the ‘degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed’

by admin October 1, 2025

Sora 2, the latest model of OpenAI’s text-to-video tech, has now launched alongside a dedicated app. Besides spitting out all of the soulless, AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style animation one could ever want, Sora 2 can now generate live action clips with both sound and a frankly scary level of visual accuracy.

Granted, not all of the clips OpenAI shares in its announcement are flawless, with its AI-generated snippet of a practicing martial artist featuring a warping bo staff and smooshed phalanges. Still, OpenAI is keen to highlight Sora 2’s gains in depicting consistent body mechanics that adhere to the rules of the physical world; the twirling body horror of earlier models generated gymnastics clips may be a thing of the past.

The company also touts Sora 2’s ability to “directly inject elements of the real world” into its AI-generated clips. It elaborates, “For example, by observing a video of one of our teammates, the model can insert them into any Sora-generated environment with an accurate portrayal of appearance and voice. This capability is very general, and works for any human, animal or object.” If you’re so inclined to descend into the realm of deepfakes, the Sora app, powered by Sora 2, is available on the iOS store now.

OpenAI touts the app as not just a video generator but also a social environment.

“You can create, remix each other’s generations, discover new videos in a customizable Sora feed, and bring yourself or your friends in via cameos,” the company writes. “With cameos, you can drop yourself straight into any Sora scene with remarkable fidelity after a short one-time video-and-audio recording in the app to verify your identity and capture your likeness.”

One can see the whimsical appeal of sharing AI-generated clips of yourself riding ostriches and pulling off extremely dangerous stunts, but I also can’t ignore the risk posed by deepfakes. For one thing, US president Donald Trump shared an expletive-laden deepfake video on Truth Social literally the day before Sora 2’s launch (via Ars Technica).

The sombrero superimposed over representative Hakeem Jeffries is hopefully a telltale sign for most viewers that the remarks senator Chuck Schumer is depicted as saying in this clip (which was not created using Sora 2) are wholly fabricated. However, given that a Microsoft study suggests folks struggle to accurately identify AI-generated still images 62% of the time, it’s hard not to be concerned about deepfakes’ capacity for disinformation.

Videos generated with Sora 2 don’t even feature a tiny AI watermark, like those introduced in Gemini’s ‘Nano Banana’ image-editing update. OpenAI say they are ‘launching responsibly,’ with in-app features designed to “maximize creation, not consumption,” and address “concerns about doomscrolling, addiction, isolation, and RL-sloptimized feeds.” But comments made by company CEO Sam Altman on his own blog read contrapuntal even to this stated feed philosophy.

“It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed,” Altman first admits.

As such, he shares that the app has various “mitigations to prevent someone from misusing someone’s likeness in deepfakes, safeguards for disturbing or illegal content, periodic checks on how Sora is impacting users’ mood and wellbeing, and more.”

Altman even goes as far as to say that, if OpenAI cannot sufficiently address aspects of the app that lead to negative social outcomes, then the company would discontinue the service.

But Altman also caps off a longer passage regarding how the Sora feed aims to show content that users are interested in by writing, “And if you truly just want to doom scroll and be angry, then ok, we’ll help you with that.” To me, this reads not only as a shrugging off of responsibility, but also fairly nihilistic; for all OpenAI’s talk about the Sora app’s safety features, what can be done if its users still choose to gaze into the abyss?

(Image credit: OpenAI)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also reference the existentialism and labour concerns the launch of the Sora 2 model will no doubt inspire in my freelance creative friends. Altman writes on his blog, “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase.” And I would like to suggest that he may be right, just not how he thinks.

While Altman wants OpenAI’s app to be at the forefront of a tidal wave of creativity, my personal hope is that audiences get sick of realistic, computer generated imagery as a result of Sora 2’s proliferation. My blue sky thinking—however naive it may be—is the hope that, in response to audiences seeking out visual art that could only ever be made by humans, practical effects and puppets make a comeback in a big way.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

OpenAI’s New Social Network Is Reportedly TikTok If It Was Just an AI Slop Feed

by admin September 30, 2025

Welcome to the age of anti-social media. According to a report from Wired, OpenAI is planning on launching a standalone app for its video generation tool Sora 2 that will include a TikTok-style video scroll that will let people scroll through entirely AI-generated videos. The quixotic effort follows Meta’s recent launch of an AI-slop-only feed on its Meta AI app that was met with nearly universal negativity.

Per Wired, the Sora 2 app will feature the familiar swipe-up-to-scroll style navigation that is featured for most vertical video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. It’ll also use a personalized recommendation algorithm to feed users content that might appeal to their interests. Users will be able to like, comment, or “remix” a post—all very standard social media fare.

The big difference is that all of the content on the platform will be AI-generated via OpenAI’s video generation model that can take text, photos, or existing video and AI-ify it. The videos will be up to 10 seconds long, presumably because that’s about how long Sora can hold itself together before it starts hallucinating weird shit. (The first version of Sora allows videos up to 60 seconds, but struggles to produce truly convincing and continuous imagery for that long.) According to Wired, there is no way to directly upload a photo or video and post it unedited.

Interestingly, OpenAI has figured out how to work a social element into the app, albeit in a way that has a sort of inherent creepiness to it. Per Wired, the Sora 2 app will ask users to verify their identity via facial recognition to confirm their likeness. After confirming their identity, their likeness can be used in videos. Not only can they insert themselves into a video, but other users can tag you and use your likeness in their videos. Users will reportedly get notified any time their likeness is used, even if the generated video is saved to drafts and never posted.

How that will be implemented when and if the app launches to the public, we’ll have to see. But as reported, it seems like an absolute nightmare. Basically, the only thing that the federal government has managed to find any sort of consensus around when it comes to regulating AI is offering some limited protections against non-consensual deepfakes. As described, that kind of seems like one feature of Sora 2 is letting your likeness be manipulated by others. Surely there will be some sort of opt-out available or ability to restrict who can use your likeness, right?

According to Wired, there will be some protections as to the type of content that Sora 2 will allow users to create. It is trained to refuse to violate copyright, for instance, and will reportedly have filters in place to restrict certain types of videos from being produced. But will it actually offer sufficient protection to people? OpenAI made a big point to emphasize how it added protections to the original Sora model to prevent it from generating nudity and explicit images, but tests of the system managed to get it to create prohibited content anyway at a low-but-not-zero rate.

Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI to confirm its plans for the app, but did not receive a response at the time of publication. There has been speculation for months about the launch of Sora 2, with some expectation that it would be announced at the same time as GPT-5. For now, it and its accompanying app remain theoretical, but there is at least one good idea hidden in the concept of the all-AI social feed, albeit probably not in the way OpeAI intended it: Keep AI content quarantined.

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September 30, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

OpenAI’s Teen Safety Features Will Walk a Thin Line

by admin September 17, 2025

OpenAI announced new teen safety features for ChatGPT on Tuesday as part of an ongoing effort to respond to concerns about how minors engage with chatbots. The company is building an age-prediction system that identifies if a user is under 18 years old and routes them to an “age-appropriate” system that blocks graphic sexual content. If the system detects that the user is considering suicide or self-harm, it will contact the user’s parents. In cases of imminent danger, if a user’s parents are unreachable, the system may contact the authorities.

In a blog post about the announcement, CEO Sam Altman wrote that the company is attempting to balance freedom, privacy, and teen safety.

“We realize that these principles are in conflict, and not everyone will agree with how we are resolving that conflict,” Altman wrote. “These are difficult decisions, but after talking with experts, this is what we think is best and want to be transparent in our intentions.”

While OpenAI tends to prioritize privacy and freedom for adult users, for teens the company says it puts safety first. By the end of September, the company will roll out parental controls so that parents can link their child’s account to their own, allowing them to manage the conversations and disable features. Parents can also receive notifications when “the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress,” according to the company’s blog post, and set limits on the times of day their children can use ChatGPT.

The moves come as deeply troubling headlines continue to surface about people dying by suicide or committing violence against family members after engaging in lengthy conversations with AI chatbots. Lawmakers have taken notice, and both Meta and OpenAI are under scrutiny. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission asked Meta, OpenAI, Google, and other AI firms to hand over information about how their technologies impact kids, according to Bloomberg.

At the same time, OpenAI is still under a court order mandating that it preserve consumer chats indefinitely—a fact that the company is extremely unhappy about, according to sources I’ve spoken to. Today’s news is both an important step toward protecting minors and a savvy PR move to reinforce the idea that conversations with chatbots are so personal that consumer privacy should only be breached in the most extreme circumstances.

“A Sexbot Avatar in ChatGPT”

From the sources I’ve spoken to at OpenAI, the burden of protecting users weighs heavily on many researchers. They want to create a user experience that is fun and engaging, but it can quickly veer into becoming disastrously sycophantic. It’s positive that companies like OpenAI are taking steps to protect minors. At the same time, in the absence of federal regulation, there’s still nothing forcing these firms to do the right thing.

In a recent interview, Tucker Carlson pushed Altman to answer exactly who is making these decisions that impact the rest of us. The OpenAI chief pointed to the model behavior team, which is responsible for tuning the model for certain attributes. “The person I think you should hold accountable for those calls is me,” Altman added. “Like, I’m a public face. Eventually, like, I’m the one that can overrule one of those decisions or our board.”

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September 17, 2025 0 comments