After the AI-video rush, audiences may be rewarding visible human effort

Meta’s Vibes remains live, while OpenAI has shut down Sora’s app and API, according to a 2 October opinion article in The Drum. Its argument is that the experiment left a cultural lesson: audiences may value visible human craft more than a conveyor belt of synthetic content.

Watch Desk analysis

What happened

Becky Owen, global chief marketing officer at creator agency Billion Dollar Boy and a former Meta executive, argues that the launch of Vibes and Sora 2 helped prompt a backlash against generic AI-made social video. She calls the countertrend “effort signalling”: audiences notice when a creator or brand appears to have put care into what it publishes.

Owen cites her agency’s research, which found that the share of consumers preferring AI-generated creator content fell from 60% in 2023 to 26% in 2025. She also says 84% of surveyed creators report that AI lightens their workload. Those figures come from the agency’s own research as presented in the article, not an independent measure of audiences or creators as a whole.

Why it matters

The distinction is not simply AI versus no AI. Owen argues that AI can be useful behind the scenes, taking on technical or repetitive production work, while audiences resist content that feels mass-produced and interchangeable. That is a sharper question for platforms and creative teams than whether a video was made with a particular tool: does the result give people a reason to care?

The article also points to two different product trajectories. It says OpenAI shut the Sora app in April and switched off its API on 24 September, while Meta’s Vibes remains available. That contrast does not, by itself, prove why either company made its choices or what users wanted.

Our read

“Human mess won” is a memorable headline-sized verdict, but the evidence offered is more nuanced: audiences may welcome AI when it supports creative work and reject it when it becomes a shortcut to flooding the feed. The survey figures are worth considering, with the usual reminder that a company’s research is not the whole audience.

For creators and brands, the practical test is refreshingly unglamorous: use AI where it improves the work, then make something people can tell someone cared about. Even the cleverest generator cannot fake having a point of view forever.

What to watch

• Whether audience research from other sources finds the same shift in preferences.
• Whether Meta changes Vibes or its promotion as the platform’s first anniversary passes.
• Whether creative teams use AI to support distinctive work, rather than simply produce more of it.

Discussion spark: When AI helps make creative work, should audiences care how much of the process was automated, or only whether the finished work feels considered?

Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.