TR.BIZ: 10.7.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in, where we cover BFAs in influencer and boo baskets ✨

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re exploring Sora 2 killing the internet, the state of creators, boo baskets, and the hate of “new” celebrity faces.

QUICK REMINDER: save the date for October 23, as music critic and writer Philip Sherburne of Futurism Restated will be joining me for a talk on music writing. Learn more and RSVP here! Also? It’s FREEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

📲 Tech Talk: At the gates of hell with Sora 2

On a scale of raw to burnt to hell, we are somewhere in the space of the top layer starting to blacken as we become completely cooked — and I’m talking about digital culture, specifically in relation to Sora 2. Since it “dropped” last Tuesday to now, the contract of consuming digital media on TikTok and Reels changed, all driven by these soulless videos that represents what happens when creativity is sacrificed for “efficiency,” when social media — or media itself — becomes “a feed,” as we come to learn that “content” actually is in fact slop. As Sora 2 soared to the top of the app store, something crept in, where every video you watch now has to be second guessed, where media has become an exercise in double consciousness: Is this real or is it fake? Is this verifiable? Your best digital hygiene has to be on at all times, making the internet a fully realized space of work that has scrubbed out any “fun”: for every Pikachu in Saving Private Ryan or Mario in Star Wars, there are deep fakes of your friends and AI creators doing unboxings. What starts as silly TikTok jokes about Jake Paul “being gay” via AI videos ends with Jake Paul making response videos that wade into homophobia. Streamer XQC has also become a target of Sora deep fakes. “I’m part of the training data?” he wondered after watching forty minutes of these deep fakes. “It can make you do anything. That’s the future.” “This could change content creation for the worse,” a creator explained. “Imagine a world where YouTube have to share 50% of its revenue to content creators because they’re making the content themselves?” A fair point, that Mr. Beast agrees with, as YouTube has been pushing “AI creation” and Vtubers for some time. This then floods into the AI copycat books and AI misrepresenting real estate to flawed products from rich people, all mindless items that overheat October and further taint drinking water. “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda Williams — Robin Williams’ daughter — bemoaned recently. “For the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed.” All this, as every conservative government everywhere warns us of immigrants while cozying up to this technology.

• What can you do about this? Girl, idek. Log off?? But also: digital spaces are being hollowed out, all while creations will fall under greater scrutiny as people question if it “is real” or just really bad AI (which is worse than being mediocre work by people). For example: Taylor Swift crashed into this conversation as people called her out for allegedly using AI in release videos, which sparked the #SwiftiesAgainstAI movement. Even if it wasn’t AI, the is-it-or-isn’t-it question is tainting so many conversations. (Which is a shame, given how non-AI and diverse her latest music video is.)

💥 Soft Powers: A BFA in influencer?