When Meta announced its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds last week a lot of us laughed. 

Social scientist Dr Ruth Diaz was not one of them. 

Diaz worked for Meta as a VR community design developer in the early days of the Horizon Worlds project and left in 2022. After Meta’s announcement last week, Diaz wrote a post on LinkedIn attempting to articulate her feelings. “I cannot overstate the scale of institutional betrayal this represents,” she said in her post. “Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta to claim transformation. What he has actually done is strip-mine the trust and labor of every creator who took that promise seriously. That should sit on his record permanently. I feel horror. Rage. Grief. Shame. The specific shame of having believed.”

Diaz said she fell in love with VR after her brother lent her a PC virtual reality setup and she collaborated on art with people spontaneously in a virtual world. “VR puts us into a very disinhibited state where we can open our hearts and try on new identities,” she told 404 Media. “It's an equalizer of identities, some because of the anonymity, but some because we all choose our own skin. That creates an even footing of sorts.”

She said she signed on with Meta after being impressed by an early version of their Horizon Worlds toolkit. After joining the company, she spent some of her time getting employees into headsets and showing them around the virtual worlds people had made. “And many times, I had them in tears by the end because they finally understood what was possible,” she said. “And I don't think any other social app has ever built a tool that had that combination of simplicity and hands on learning how to create.”

In a follow up post on LinkedIn, Diaz shared some of these worlds including the interactive biography of an amputee named Lacey and an Underground Railroad experience from a woman named Bizerka. She pointed out that Alcoholics Anonymous holds meetings in Horizon Worlds and shared a church that meets on Meta’s platform every Sunday.

Diaz’s fears were allayed somewhat on March 18 when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth backpedaled on shutting Horizon Worlds down completely. During an AMA posted to Instagram, he told fans that the company would keep Horizon Worlds accessible for “the foreseeable future.” But Meta is capricious and it’s impossible to know exactly how far into the future its imagining.

“I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll work, but I think it could, because it’s very unusual for them to flinch,” Diaz told 404 Media. “They usually just kind of hunker down and pretend they don’t see it and go full PR.”

She said that Bosworth’s promise to keep Horizon Worlds running wasn’t a big enough promise.  “The way they have behaved here is profoundly harmful and I would deem it a type of psychological torture from corporate neglect,” she said. “But the horror of this is ongoing, because [Bosworth] came out and said: ‘we’re going to keep it for now,’ that doesn’t reassure anybody, that doesn’t help anybody. That makes people feel foolish for being upset but also completely uncertain about their futures.”

Wagner James Au, author of Making a Metaverse That Matters and the blog New World Notes, told 404 Media that he’s sympathetic. He also noted that building the type of community she did without the support and infrastructure of a company like Meta is difficult. “A common mistake is to assume the Metaverse should be a non-corporate open source project. Those have been tried and they've all failed to gain traction,” he said.

In the end, the social connections Diaz fostered will remain even as the spaces fade. “Metaverse communities are what's important and permanent, not any particular 3D space they're associated with,” James Au said. “User communities create, congregate, and socialize around 3D spaces, but those spaces age over time and lose their luster. What's important is that they helped foster social connections which can be resilient beyond any one platform. It's why so much metaverse activity happens outside the immersive space on Bluesky, Reddit, etc.”

Like Diaz, James Au doesn’t trust the Zuckerberg. “Meta has consistently failed in its responsibilities to users, so I'm not sure it's realistic for Horizon Worlds users to expect anything from it now,” he said.

Meta’s Metaverse was doomed from the start but that doesn’t mean the idea itself is bad or even Meta’s underlying technology. Diaz and others found community there. “Despite the ups and downs and branding and ‘Metaverse is dead’ and whatever, all these twists and turns, the tools [themselves] have incredible merit. And that’s the only message I’ve ever tried to bring, and I’m just heartbroken that it got attached to these companies,” Diaz said.

Barely three months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would be bringing user-generated AI slop to Disney+ as part of a landmark $1 billion investment into OpenAI that would allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters. The announcement was so important that Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both championed it in a press release that is full of the kind of cope that Silicon Valley AI boosters and some Hollywood executives suggest would unleash a new era of moviemaking and storytelling powered by AI that is cheaper than making movies with human workers.

“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Iger said. 

“Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees,” the press release stated. “Under the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+, and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI’s models to power new experiences for Disney+ subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney’s stories and characters. Sora and ChatGPT Images are expected to start generating fan-inspired videos with Disney’s multi-brand licensed characters in early 2026.”

Tuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney’s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood. Disney did not even get to the point here it allowed people to build anything with Disney characters before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor and its investment.

Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing. 

Disney is pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI entirely. Other efforts to slopify Hollywood look underwhelming, appear to have been quietly shelved, or have utterly failed to gather any audience whatsoever. This news does not bode well for OpenAI and it likely does not bode well for Paramount’s megamerger with Warner Brothers, a deal whose financial terms and the debt involved only make sense if you can believe in a future in which the cost of creating blockbuster movies is drastically reduced by AI via huge numbers of people losing their jobs. 

Regular ejaculation — for example, by masturbation — produces higher quality sperm, a finding that has implications for fertility science and assisted reproductive technologies, according to a comprehensive new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

It’s well-established that sperm quality in many animals can deteriorate as males age, but less is known about how the age of sperm cells independently impacts reproductive outcomes. To fill in this gap, scientists co-led by Krish Sanghvi and Rebecca Dean of the University of Oxford conducted a meta-analysis of more than 115 studies about human sperm storage that cumulatively involved nearly 55,000 men, as well as 56 studies of 30 non-human species.

“Krish and I have done studies previously on the effects of male aging on fertility and offspring outcomes,” said Dean in a call with 404 Media. “So we have this joint interest in well: can sperm get old? What happens when sperm gets old? Do we see changes in fertility? Do we see changes in offspring outcomes?”

“We are sperm biologists, so these sorts of questions have been interesting to us,” added Sanghvi in the same call.

The results revealed that stored sperm deteriorates over time, resulting in DNA damage, reduced motility, and other defects that can affect fertilization and embryo outcomes. The discovery has implications for optimizing sperm quality for fertility clinics and captive breeding programs in animals, while also raising new questions about the complicated evolutionary mechanisms that govern reproduction across species. 

Sperm cells in humans, and many other vertebrates, can be stored for several days in males before they are released through ejaculation or reabsorbed by the reproductive system. Sperm can also survive for several days in the human female reproductive system. Meanwhile, some female animals have evolved to store sperm for extremely long periods in order to optimize the timing and conditions of fertilization; for example, female bats can store sperm for months, while ant and bee queens can store it for years.

“There's so much innovation within the animal world about how to maintain sperm and keep them alive and functioning,” said Dean. “In some species, the female is storing the sperm when the male who she's mated with has long since died, but she's keeping their sperm alive. It's quite incredible.”

The team found that across these species, older sperm was more likely to show signs of deterioration that can influence fertility and embryo outcomes.

“In the animal dataset, we found an effect on fertilized embryos,” Sanghvi said. “Stored sperm led to lesser viability, or embryos actually becoming an offspring, basically, which is an intergenerational, almost evolutionary effect, which I thought was quite surprising. It means that the storage of sperm or abstinence is not only having an effect on the sperm itself, but it's also doing something bad for the embryo at an early stage.” 

“We found very weak effects in adult offspring, like offspring lifespan or offspring reproduction,” he added. “Those weren't significant. But at the embryo stage, there was a stronger effect.”

Interestingly, insects that store sperm for weeks or months were able to maintain sperm quality at only a slightly higher level than insects that store it for years, underscoring that these animals have evolved sophisticated adaptations for long-term sperm storage. These amazing techniques across nature could inspire new approaches for future assisted reproduction in humans. 

“Recently, there has been a huge boom in research on female reproductive fluids, or ovarian fluids, which are the chemicals in fluids released by females in their sperm storage organs,” Sanghvi said. “They have a lot of proteins that help with DNA repair, or the motility of sperm. They also have a lot of antioxidants, and small RNAs that change how sperm are transcribing their genes.” 

“Maybe we can learn: what are the cocktails or chemicals in female storage? And can we actually replicate these molecules?” he added.

The study also sheds light on the possible evolutionary origins of masturbation, which has been observed in humans (a lot) as well as dozens of other species including dolphins, elephants, lions, and many primates. Masturbation may have emerged as a way to avoid leaving sperm in the tank for too long. Indeed, even species that don’t masturbate in the traditional sense of self-stimulation have still been observed offloading sperm in a practice called “sperm dumping.” 

Masturbation has “been a sort of mystery,” Sanghvi said. “Sperm are costly to produce. For many animals it involves a lot of fluids, maturation, time, and energy investment. So why just get rid of it? A longstanding hypothesis has been that sperm are deteriorating within males when they are stored.”

“Crabs do something similar,” he continued. “Every time they moult, some crabs will just get rid of all their sperm. So again, why waste all of this? One reason could be that it's getting rid of the stored old sperm.”

In addition to yielding new insights into the evolutionary tradeoffs of sperm storage, the study can inform the best approaches to assisted reproduction in humans, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). 

For example, the World Health Organization currently typically recommends that men undergo two to seven days of abstinence before donating semen in order to boost the number of sperm in the samples. However, the new study suggests the benefits of high sperm quantity should be weighed against sperm quality linked to the age of the sperm, which has implications for human fertility, as well as captive breeding programs for livestock and other animals.

To sum up, to ensure high sperm quality, avoid keeping too much spunk in your junk and regularly evacuate the ejaculate.

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Actually all the apocalypses are good for philosophers, but this one is best for language analysis.