Because software is supposed to make life better—not harder.

I’ve been using ChatGPT and Sora for a while now. I even pay for both. But at this point, I can’t stay silent about the mounting UX issues — especially on Sora. We’re talking about outages lasting 12 hours or more, constant instability, and basic usability problems that should have been solved years ago. These aren’t edge-case bugs. These are core-experience failures.

As an outsider, I don’t know what’s happening inside OpenAI. But if AI is supposedly writing world-class code, then why are these platforms constantly stumbling? Maybe the teams are too focused on the AI engine and not enough on the user experience. Maybe there aren’t enough seasoned engineers or UX veterans steering the ship. I can only speculate. But if anyone reading this actually works there, I would love to talk — because the customers deserve clarity.

In 2025, there is simply no excuse for daily instability from a company at this scale. I signed up for OpenAI’s incident notifications, and most days my inbox looks like a rolling disaster log. Transparency is great — but consistent reliability would be better.

I’ve spent my entire career building and optimizing websites, so these problems frustrate me even more — especially when I’m paying for the service. Below are just some of the recurring issues that are killing the experience for loyal users like me. My hope is that OpenAI will treat UX as a first-class priority — because that’s how you earn customers, and more importantly, keep them.

Sora: Powerful, Impressive… and Constantly Fighting Itself

Sora can produce stunning work. But the UX? It feels like an unfinished beta.

1. Folder Chaos: A File System Without Order

Sora’s folder system should help organize your images and prompts. Instead, it creates frustration:

No Sorting for Folders

Folders appear in the order they were created. That’s it. No alphabetical sorting, no drag-and-drop, no customization. When you have dozens, good luck finding what you need.

Images Are Unsortable

Images inside folders are locked to date order. Alphabetical? Nope. Custom sorting? Nope. Efficiency? Definitely not.

Some Folders Simply Disappear

On my laptop, entire sections of my folder list vanish off-screen, and there’s no way to scroll or resize the panel to reach them. I literally cannot access or organize part of my own library. That’s a UX red flag.

2. “Your Session Expired” — A Dead-End Message

Sora randomly expires your session. But when you follow the prompt and attempt to log in again… nothing happens.

Instead, I must manually return to the root URL:

https://sora.chatgpt.com/

And suddenly everything works — without logging in. So why is the message appearing at all?

If UX had a hall of shame, this would be framed on the wall.

3. Stability Rollercoaster: Outages, Slowdowns, and Vanishing Pages

Down for Two Days

Recently, I couldn’t use Sora for roughly two days. OpenAI’s own system status page showed cascading issues that lasted over four days. A global AI company should not be going offline like a hobby project.

Image Generation Taking 20–40 Minutes

Most of my requests take 2–3 minutes. But sometimes they spike to 40 minutes or never complete at all. Worse: the status page shows no issues. The UX screams “we’re overloaded,” but the official data denies it.

Pages Randomly Failing to Load

On Nov. 13, one folder simply refused to load images — while every other folder worked fine. No error. No warning. Just missing content.

Explore Page Downgrade

The Explore page used to have infinite scroll. Now it loads only a tiny batch of images — making it harder to browse, harder to learn, and harder to get inspired.

Other Problems:

• Generated images sometimes don’t download.
• The delete function broke for weeks, was fixed, then broke again — and has been broken since the summer of 2025.
• There isn’t an Enter button to trigger a prompt submission.
• You can’t filter searches to “images only” or “videos only.”
• On Dec. 1, refreshing the My Media page made all the November images disappear temporarily. What?!?!
• The Copy Code link is enabled while the code is being generated. It should be disabled during generation.
• A few days after I released this article, I could not log into Sora at all!

This is not normal. This is not acceptable for a paid tool.

Cloudflare Outage: The Confusing Error Message

During the global Cloudflare outage, Sora went dark for nearly a full day. But the error messages displayed to users made no sense at all — leaving everyone confused about whether Sora or their own system was broken. Clear error handling is UX 101.

AI Image Generation: The Struggle for Precision

One of the most frustrating aspects of Sora is how hard it is to get the precise placement of objects or text.

ChatGPT explained it like this:

Sora struggles to place text because it treats text as part of the full image, not as a distinct, movable design element. It prioritizes aesthetics and real-world patterns, so layout instructions often get ignored, distorted, or cropped.

That explains the behavior, but it doesn’t reduce the frustration.

A few examples from my workflow:

• Trying to place an airplane in the lower third of an image took multiple attempts — and Sora still wandered all over the canvas.
• AI consistently misspells text. Every system. Every service.
• Sometimes I have to abandon Sora entirely and open a separate editor just to add text cleanly.

AI is powerful, but when it ignores explicit layout instructions, it breaks the user’s flow — and adds unnecessary rework.

Even More Issues

And it didn’t take long—within a week of publishing this article, new issues were already starting to show up.

December 25th 2025

For some reason, Sora (thanks, Cloudflare!) keeps asking me to prove I’m human — over and over and over. It’s killing my workflow.

Constraining Image Generation

As of February 14, 2026, OpenAI has introduced a hard limit on image generation under the $20 paid plan: 50 images per day. Yes—fifty. To remove that limit, the only option is upgrading to a $200-per-month plan. That’s not an upsell; that’s a wall.

This isn’t my job. I’m not running an agency or a production studio. I’m a paying customer who uses image generation as part of a broader creative and technical workflow. So why is there no reasonably priced middle tier? Why is the jump from $20 straight to $200?

What’s most frustrating is that this isn’t a new feature. Image generation has been part of the service for years. Putting long-standing capabilities behind an aggressive paywall doesn’t feel like innovation—it feels like regression. And it’s certainly not a strategy that builds goodwill or long-term loyalty.

When software companies take away what users already rely on and call it “progress,” they shouldn’t be surprised when customers start looking elsewhere. At this point, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Final Thoughts: The Magic Is Real — But the UX Must Catch Up

I want to be clear: Sora has allowed me to create some absolutely stunning images. Every image in my last two books — even the covers — was created using Sora. Every conference presentation I give now relies on Sora-generated visuals.

So yes, the technology is extraordinary.

But extraordinary tech with subpar UX becomes exhausting.

OpenAI — and especially Sora — must invest heavily in user experience and reliability. Otherwise, professional creators, designers, and engineers won’t trust these tools for real work. How can anyone depend on a system that goes down for hours or misplaces content you rely on?

My advice to OpenAI:

• Hire experienced UX designers. Real ones. Senior ones. Lots of them.
• Hire veteran engineers. People who have decades of experience building reliable, scalable systems.
• Stop using AI to write your production code. Let experienced humans write it. Let AI review it.
• Make UX and stability top-tier priorities. Not afterthoughts. Not backlog items.

As I was putting the finishing touches on this article, Adobe Firefly suddenly stopped generating images altogether. It was a timely reminder that these reliability issues aren’t limited to a single platform—AI image-generation tools across the board are still struggling with stability, consistency, and uptime.

AI may be the future — but without a solid user experience, nobody will stick around long enough to enjoy it.

UX Chronicles: How OpenAI Broke Sora

The Untapped Power of Veteran Engineers: Why Companies Are Overlooking Their Most Valuable Assets – Part 1

The graphic art I created with AI: https://mccarterphotography.smugmug.com/Graphic-Arts

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