Sora AI First Impressions: Real Use, No Hype

I got into Sora. Finally. After getting blocked from even logging in because of demand, I managed to get access to OpenAI’s text-to-video tool and immediately started poking around like a kid who just unwrapped something expensive on Christmas morning. 🤙 And look, if you’ve been watching those perfectly polished Sora demo videos and wondering what it’s really like to sit down and try this thing yourself, I’m about to give you the unfiltered version. 👇

Because nobody’s showing you the parts where you misspell “Christmas” in the folder name, or where the tool flat-out refuses to touch your image because there’s a person in it.

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The Login Screen Almost Stopped Me Before I Started

So right off the bat I want to be honest about something. I couldn’t even get in at first. The demand was so high that OpenAI’s servers were basically saying “come back later.” Which tells you everything about the hype around this thing.

But I got in. And the first thing I said was basically: “my first impressions of Sora”—”In this video, I’m going to show you my first impressions of Sora. I’m going to show you the interface. I’m going to show you how I’m going to be using it or how I intend to use it because I haven’t used it before.”

That’s the key part. I hadn’t used it before. This isn’t a review from someone who spent two weeks crafting the perfect demo. This is me clicking around for the first time, figuring out what buttons do, and learning in real time what works and what doesn’t.

The Sora AI Interface: Cleaner Than Expected, Still Confusing

The first thing I did was check out the sidebar, because that’s just how my brain works. I want to know where everything lives before I start touching things. And the Sora Library is laid out pretty simply. You’ve got sections for All Videos, Recent, Featured, Saved, Favorites, Uploads, and you can create new folders.

I immediately tried to create a folder called “Christmas.” Spelled it wrong the first time. Had to click out and redo it. Classic. But hey, that’s the real experience, right?

The Featured section raised an interesting question for me though. I was looking at it thinking, “I don’t know if this is people who have allowed their videos to be shared or if there’s something in the terms of service that states that we can take your video and throw it up on our recent’s page.” That’s a privacy question worth paying attention to as this platform grows.

One thing I did like: the create bar is persistent. No matter where you are in the interface, you can start generating a video. As I put it: “This seems to stay there all the time, so no matter where I am, I’m always going to be able to create a video it seems.” Small detail, but it makes the workflow feel less clunky than I expected.

The “No People” Rule Nobody Talks About

OK so here’s where things got real interesting and real frustrating.

When I clicked the upload button, a Media Upload Agreement popup showed up warning me not to upload inappropriate media. Fine, expected that. But then a second popup appeared telling me my account doesn’t currently support videos with uploaded media that contains people. Yes, really.

Full stop. No people at all.

I tried to upload a still picture related to a skateboarding image later in my session, and the program wouldn’t allow it because there was a person in the frame. Completely blocked. And honestly, I get why—this is OpenAI trying to prevent deepfakes before they become a problem. TechCrunch’s analysis confirms this is an intentional safety feature, not a bug.

But here’s my honest take: this is going to be a dealbreaker for a LOT of creators. If you were imagining using Sora to animate photos of yourself or create videos featuring real people, that’s just not happening in this phase. The tool is limited to objects, environments, abstract concepts, and non-human characters when it comes to uploaded media.

OpenAI is also building in C2PA metadata, basically a digital watermark that tags content as AI-generated. It’s a smart move, even if the metadata can technically be stripped. They’re clearly thinking about this stuff seriously.

My First Sora Video Generation: Origami Santa (Sort Of)

Alright, time to actually make something. I started typing “Create a video of Santa” but then changed my mind and edited the prompt to focus on creating an origami reindeer. After hitting generate, Sora did something interesting, it auto-titled my project “Santa’s Origami Surprise.”

Two side-by-side videos popped up. Both showed origami Santa figures, but here’s the thing: no reindeer showed up. The prompt said reindeer. Sora gave me Santa. This is the gap between what you ask for and what you get that the official demos conveniently leave out.

One of the two versions did have more metadata attached to it, which was cool. I could see additional details about how it was generated and click through to terms and policies. That level of transparency is appreciated, and it’s something I didn’t expect from a first release.

But the reality is, my first generated video didn’t look like what I intended. What was missing was the specific action I described. I wanted the Santa Claus character to blow up in sprinkles on screen, and that just… didn’t happen. The video looked good, genuinely impressive for AI-generated content, but it wasn’t what I asked for.

The Storyboard Tool: Powerful But Not What I Expected

After my first generation, I clicked on “Create Story” to try extending the video, and this is where I hit a learning curve. The storyboard tool is described as “a tool to help you visualize the actions, sequence, and timing in your video, use photos, videos, and text to describe each shot along a timeline before generating your final video.”

Sounds amazing on paper. In practice, the process was way different than how I expected it to work. It’s not just “type more and get a longer video.” You’re building out a timeline with individual shots, which is a fundamentally different mental model than just writing a prompt and hitting go.

I ended up pulling in ChatGPT to help me write better text for the storyboard, which is kind of funny when you think about it. Using one AI to feed better prompts into another AI. We’re living in the future and it’s weird. It’s like that scene in Inception where you’re going layers deep except instead of dreams it’s just AI tools talking to each other while you sit there hoping something coherent comes out the other side.

I also played with the aspect ratio settings, swapping to different formats and re-running the generation. The ability to change aspect ratio on the fly is genuinely useful, especially if you’re thinking about creating content for different platforms (vertical for TikTok/Reels, widescreen for YouTube, etc.).

The Blend Feature and Continued Experiments

After my initial tests, I started messing with the blend feature, trying to combine elements to create something closer to what I imagined. This is where you start to see the real creative potential of Sora, not in single-prompt generation, but in the iterative process of layering, blending, and refining.

The workflow reminds me a lot of early Midjourney days, where the magic wasn’t in your first generation but in your fifth or sixth, after you’d learned how the tool “thinks” and adjusted your expectations accordingly.

And that’s honestly the biggest takeaway from my first hour with Sora: this is a tool that rewards patience and iteration. Your first video won’t be perfect. Your prompt won’t translate one-to-one. But the base quality of what it produces is genuinely impressive, and I could feel that once I learned the tool’s language, the results would get dramatically better.

Final Thoughts

My Sora AI first impressions boil down to this: the potential is real, but so are the limitations. The interface is cleaner than I expected, the video quality is genuinely impressive even when it doesn’t match your prompt, and the storyboard tool hints at a future where AI video creation is actually a serious production workflow.

But the people restriction is a hard wall that limits what most creators will want to do with it, and the gap between prompt and output means you’re going to spend a lot of time iterating before you get something usable.

If you’re expecting to type a sentence and get a finished, perfect video, reset those expectations right now. But if you’re willing to learn the tool, experiment with prompts, and work within the current guardrails, there’s something genuinely exciting here.

If you like this kind of content, I’m going to be making a lot more on Sora obviously, because it’s a brand new awesome tech. And honestly, I can’t wait to see where this goes once they start loosening those restrictions. Because once they do, it’s going to be a completely different conversation.

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