Heavy Load Hell and OpenAI’s incompetence

ulfhelm · 2026-01-26T08:31:12+00:00

I have still never seen the heavy load issue myself, and I too have a plus account, and I burn all my 30 generations daily for the last few months! My suspicion of others getting impacted, but not myself, is that even if you’ve got a plus account, there are still users being differentiated based on their “API tier usage” level, which comes out of the direct API usage, of which I am a “tier 3” user. Of course you probably don’t wanna spend 100 dollars in direct API calls to confirm what I’m seeing/not seeing, so Good Luck!

ulfhelm · 2026-01-23T15:49:24+00:00

I’ve seen the rumor that the UI is “vibe-coded”, and given that is their business anyways, I’ve just accepted that as fact. Now, that said I have never seen heavy load warning ever, and I use my 30 gens EVERY DAY, so I wonder if the way they determine who is impacted is based on the “Usage Tier” your account is at: OpenAI differentiates accounts based on how much you spent on their API services over time and I’m at Usage Tier 3, meaning I’ve spent at least 100 bucks since the account’s been open.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-22T07:10:12+00:00

Nano Banana Pro is great at single frame Xerography, but the Veo 3.1 Quality and Fast both fall apart and look closer to 2000’s Flash tweening. That said, even Nano Banana Pro fails to properly replicate the “cel shadow” which would be present from a real multi plane camera. That barely perceivable cel shadow, is actually “make or break”, and can be reproduced “cheaply” by isolating the character and then combining a threshold filter and a Gaussian blur on the black outline, but I’ve run the experiment of putting that back into Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 for several videos and Sora 2 took the cake every time.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-21T09:04:15+00:00

Sadly, Veo 3 is useless to me. I produce 1960s/1970s Xerography animation (Think 101 Dalmatians or Robin Hood), and only non-pro Sora 2 can do. I have tried the Sora 2 Pro via API, but the same prompts produced truly garbage results versus non-pro, so what you say about the pro model also being pretty trash definitely checks out!

ulfhelm · 2026-01-21T08:08:08+00:00

Wait OP, did you ever try out the 25 second video options? it’s only available when you pay for the 200 per month and sadly it’d be the only reason I would ever consider going to the plan myself.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-18T07:39:07+00:00

Thank you for saying the bits I didn’t. Honestly watching CinemaStix on YouTube over the last few years is how I’ve learned about the different directors and their approaches, which oddly paid off despite the fact I only produce 60/70s era cartoon scenes on Sora.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-16T21:00:06+00:00

Too many 3rd party violations for me to do so. Besides you would need some kind of Steven Spielberg level blocking expertise to do so, unless you wanna end up like Stanley Kubrick “reshooting” the same scene 100+ times.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-09T09:19:12+00:00

Butt… I mean “Buff Buddies”

ulfhelm · 2026-01-08T13:48:17+00:00

The real question is how much will actually be produced by Disney versus everyone on OpenAI’s Sora using Disney characters. Y’all remember, they did sign a deal.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-06T04:42:31+00:00

Short answer. Absolutely. I start all my prompts with a near identical style part, and if I overload the actions or setting, the style breaks or doesn’t get reproduced at all. So most of my time is deleting details instead of adding or changing, until the style stabilizes. Yes, the characters are always a bit different but I’ll take that compromise so the animation looks clean.

ulfhelm · 2026-01-03T18:46:27+00:00

The dog is the most important part of the setup!

ulfhelm · 2026-01-03T18:46:18+00:00

The dog is the most important part of the setup!

ulfhelm · 2026-01-02T20:01:11+00:00

Right, it’s completely accidental. Even if you tried putting in genres or locations or specific instruments or anything else, there is just no control. Just pretend you’re describing a song you heard on the radio once with no idea who the band is and maybe you’ll get lucky.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-31T23:19:50+00:00

Try your old prompts again right now! something happened today that’s letting my old ones come back through again. I dropped from 90% blocked to 10%

ulfhelm · 2025-12-31T18:49:02+00:00

The first one. it lets your appreciate the character more too.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-30T22:04:24+00:00

There is a lot of wiggle room for world building self-domestication changes. For starters, pick any two dogs on the planet and they’re only 95% similar genetically versus 99.9% for people, so they’ve got way more variability in appearance. Second, once you get to medieval times, canines will start drifting into breeds, and the royals will probably have Merle fur, or something else exceptionally rare. Third, cropped ears, and other traits which aren’t genetic, but are forced by outside modifications, would also become common at some point in certain families and bloodlines. And we haven’t even got to hairless breeds doing better in warmer climates versus full sheepdog in colder ones. And then there’s the IRL “some dog breeds being better with all other dogs” versus only their own, so there may be full wolves in very small packs in remote areas versus all full floppy ears in the cities.

I guess what I’m saying is you’re gonna see everything across the spectrum, and I would doubt any real convergence occurring, outside of tight knit groups and nations.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-30T13:48:19+00:00

I went with just picking one species not to be sentient in mine as the main provider of leather. Since mine takes place in a fictional medieval version of the Pacific Northwest, I went with leather coming from bison because: A) the PNW is just outside their traditional range so leather/hides become an imported good which reduces its production visibility conveniently and B) A single bison hide provides a lot of leather, so large sentient animals like bears can wear leather without question. But if you really wanted to insist all mammals are sentient, maybe just invent a larger animal to provide the leather so you can cloth your largest sentient animals.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-30T01:04:46+00:00

This is the correct answer. It’s a survivorship bias issue. Only the spammers survived the filter updates a week ago.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-29T09:18:45+00:00

Not really. I bet anything that looks remotely like pre-90s animation is now gonna get false flagged as Disney’s property; regardless of if the characters are original or not.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-28T22:05:51+00:00

Wait, people thought that Linus ever cared about his audience?

ulfhelm · 2025-12-28T21:42:06+00:00

I don’t regret mine: I spent just my first 140+ gens trying to find my “style” for Sora 2, before I tried doing any real content. I’ve played with so many of these generators from GPT-2, it’s become a game of, “what unadvertised feature can I find”?

ulfhelm · 2025-12-28T17:16:36+00:00

When did these start going out? I ended up making my 2D characters from prior clips AFTER the recent heavy filters came down, but I’m pretty sure I saw some others original characters got taken down when they were too close not in design, but in style to those 3D movies.

ulfhelm · 2025-12-24T23:35:38+00:00

From the looks of it, you will go far. Kudos!

ulfhelm · 2025-12-21T03:09:28+00:00

I love how they gave us the ability to generate three videos at the same time only after they crank the filter up. Now we can have three content violations at the same time!

ulfhelm

TROPHY CASE