Sora 2 Is Creating Ads for “Epstein Island” Children’s Toys

On an initial glance, a video that’s going viral on social media looks like a typical 1990s TV commercial for a children’s toy set of a tropical island: there are palm trees, a waterfall, and — wait a minute — there’s also a secret massage room, and even an “Orange Man” action figure who looks exactly like Donald Trump and says “don’t release the files” in an ominous voice.

“Kick back with two chill old dudes!” enthuses a manic-sounding narrator. “The only island with real working spy cams hidden in secret rooms!”

It’s a dark parody poking fun at deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, in other words, who’d been accused of sex trafficking underage girls to his Caribbean island before his death in 2019. And it was all cooked up in OpenAI’s AI video generator Sora 2, which was released this week with a TikTok-style app for sharing AI-generated clips.

The satire is part of an avalanche of surreal videos churned out by users of Sora 2 since its release, including a now-viral clip of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stealing GPUs from Target shelves.

The Epstein video presages tough decisions facing OpenAI about how it’ll moderate use of the brand new platform. On a certain level, the clip has elements of the sort of cutting satire you might see on an edgy sketch comedy show; on the other hand, it’s unquestionably making fun of real-world child abuse. And as a practical matter, it shows that the platform has limited guardrails against disparaging living public figures — including the infamously thin-skinned Trump, who currently holds immense regulatory power over the AI industry.

Unsurprisingly, the fake ad immediately ginned up controversy.

“This is not the AGI,” one person wrote on X, tagging Altman. “As a parent this leaves such a bad taste. Terrible.”

“Orange man bad?” another X user wrote. “OpenAI will have a lawsuit on their hands pretty soon, or at least get stopped payments from any government work.”