Sora 2 cameo feature: Should you scan your face?

Look, I have Sora 2 codes to give away so you can access Sora ASAP. But before you get all excited and start scrolling that endless AI-generated TikTok feed, I gotta talk to you about something that’s been eating at me 🤔 Because this Sora 2 cameo feature warning isn’t just me being paranoid, it’s me connecting dots that OpenAI really doesn’t want you connecting. 👋

I genuinely think OpenAI knocked it out of the park with this app. Brilliant execution. But brilliance and trustworthiness are two very different things, and if you’re thinking about jumping into AI-powered content creation, you need to hear this first.

Why Sora 2 Is Genuinely, Annoyingly Brilliant

I want to be clear about something before I get into the scary stuff: I’m not anti-AI. I don’t have a big gripe against OpenAI or anything. But I do think you need to understand just how smart their strategy is here, because the smartness is part of the problem.

OpenAI knocked it out of the park. They skipped the social media platforms altogether and made their own. Instead of pushing Sora-generated videos out to TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts and letting those platforms harvest engagement data, OpenAI basically said “we’ll build our own feed”.

You make the content in the app. You watch the content in the app. You’re not even leaving it to go to Photoshop or Premiere Pro or anything. Everything is in the app. And regardless of what you think about that, it is the smartest move they could have possibly made.

And the way they rolled it out? You can’t even access it on desktop. At least not when it first dropped, it was like: download the app, period. Now the app is on your phone.

The Sora app reportedly reached one million downloads within its first few days. A million people, app on their phones, locked into OpenAI’s ecosystem in under a week. That’s not an accident.

Now Here’s Where the Issues Start

I’m not a huge privacy guy. I mean I do use ProtonMail, so maybe I’m getting there. But the idea of giving OpenAI so much control over my phone is unsettling.

I already have the OpenAI app, I get that, but there’s something about Sora 2 that makes it feel so much more ominous.

You know what I mean? We already know how social media companies use the data on your phone. I don’t want to say against you, but they use it. They sell it, they package it, and you get targeted ads based on the things you say while your phone’s just sitting there. It’s a real thing.

And nothing convinces me that OpenAI is not going to be doing the same thing, but to a larger degree.

The Sora 2 app risks go beyond typical social media data collection because this isn’t just tracking your browsing habits or serving you ads. The cameo feature asks you to record yourself with your front-facing camera so the AI can create a digital version of your face and your voice.

That’s biometric data.

The Sam Altman World Project Connection Nobody’s Talking About

This is where it gets real for me. Especially when Sam Altman, someone who is outspoken about ridding anonymity from the internet, is the guy running this show. That makes me think they’re up to something else.

Sam Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity, which operates the World project (formerly Worldcoin), and what they do is scan your iris with a chrome sphere called the Orb and give you a World ID. A verified human digital identity. That’s the pitch.

Sam Altman wants his new company to scan the irises of everyone on earth. That’s literally the headline. I remember hearing about this years ago and thinking no one would do it. Adoption was slow in many markets, though the project has kept expanding.

But I think there are real parallels with what this app is doing. What this app really is, is getting people to consent to a digital ID by scanning their face and pressing the I consent button, and now you have a complete picture digital footprint ID. That’s what this is.

The Sam Altman World project struggled to convince people to stick their eyeball into a chrome sphere at a kiosk, and it faced regulatory scrutiny in several countries including Kenya, Spain, and Portugal.

So what do you do when the direct approach fails? You wrap it in a fun, addictive, TikTok-style video app and call it cameo. No Orb required.

I think they just said: forget the Orb stuff and focus on Sora, scan the whole face, take the voice, and package it into one ID. Somehow, later. I think it’s coming.

They Create the Problem, Then Sell You the Solution

Here’s the part that really gets me. The justification for identity scanning, whether it’s the World project’s Orb or Sora’s cameo, is always the same: we need to verify humans because of bots. Same script every time.

The rapid rise of AI has meant it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell if articles, comments on message boards, or even the people you’re playing against in online games are real. The line is blurring.

And it’s the beautiful thing: they create the product and they sell you the solution. They built the AI that makes bots difficult to distinguish, and now they say the only way to fix it is to hand over biometric data. That’s the play.

It’s like that scene in Thank You for Smoking where Nick Naylor explains how the tobacco industry funds a research institute to prove cigarettes don’t cause cancer. The fox investigating the henhouse, except the fox also built the henhouse and is now selling security cameras. Perfect analogy.

Is Sora 2 Safe? What You Should Actually Do

So look, is Sora 2 safe to use? The video generation stuff, the scrollable feed, the text-to-video prompts, that’s standard AI tool territory. I’m not telling you to delete the app and throw your phone in a lake. Use common sense.

But the cameo portion? I am not going to be doing that. Ever. At all. Hard no.

And I strongly recommend you also don’t partake in this. It’s going to be the most extreme form of data harvesting of personal identity we’ve seen packaged as entertainment. That’s the danger.

The Sora 2 privacy concerns around the cameo feature are legitimate and specific. OpenAI has added visible watermarks and C2PA metadata as a safety measure, which is fine, but watermarking the output doesn’t protect the input: your face and voice sitting on their servers. Output safety isn’t input safety.

The Thing That Actually Terrifies Me

I want to end on something personal because this isn’t just a tech analysis for me. The idea of your likeness, your face, your voice, your entity, stored and digitized for an indefinite period is legit terrifying.

I don’t mean that hyperbolically. I mean me personally, I am terrified of the idea of your likeness being stored in some database and being infinitely farmed for something because that’s all you would be.

And cameo is a method of doing that. That’s the nightmare.

The cool fun creating, making funny memes and stuff, that’s to get you in the door. But the real selling point, in my opinion, is to get you to scan your face and digitize your voice and now they have you locked potentially forever. That’s the lock-in.

About Those Sora 2 Codes

But look at me rambling on about why you don’t want this app. You’re here because you want this app, right? You want to download it. I get it.

If you want a Sora 2 code giveaway, I’ve got two codes available. Subscribe to the channel, like the video, comment “Sora 2,” then hit me up on Instagram. Whoever does it first gets them.

And honestly even if this gets a ton of views, most people won’t go through all four steps so your odds are better than you think.

Just… maybe skip the cameo part. Please. Seriously, skip it.

Final Thoughts

I want to be real with you. Sora 2 is an incredible piece of technology and OpenAI’s strategy of building their own social platform around it is genius. I’m not telling you to avoid AI or stop being excited about what these tools can do. I’m using it too.

But the cameo feature is where I draw a hard line, and I think you should too. When the same guy who co-founded a company built around a chrome sphere to scan everyone’s eyeballs is now asking you to scan your face through a fun video app, that’s not a coincidence.

That’s a roadmap. Protect your identity.

Use the tool. Enjoy the tech. But your face and your voice are the last things that are uniquely, irreversibly yours. Don’t hand them over for a meme. Not worth it.