ChatGPT Christmas: A personalized video with Santa Claus and Sora
ChatGPT Christmas It's OpenAI's surprise gift for the holidays. With ChatGPT Christmas, all it takes is an emoji to generate a personalized video with Santa Claus speaking directly to you.
This is a real Easter egg Christmas within ChatGPT that leverages Sora, OpenAI's video generation model. The idea is simple: transform a single graphical prompt, the 🎁 emoji, into a complete flow that combines selfies, artificial intelligence, and generative video.
The feature was previewed by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, with a deliberately cryptic message on X consisting of a single emoji: 🎁. Only after a few hours, the most curious users began to experiment with ChatGPT's new behavior and share their Christmas videos with Santa Claus on social media.
ChatGPT Christmas: How the Easter Egg Emoji Works 🎁
To activate ChatGPT Christmas No complex prompts or technical knowledge are required. Simply open ChatGPT and send the 🎁 emoji as a single message, without any additional text. At this point, the chatbot doesn't respond with the usual text, but changes its behavior.
Instead of generating a written response, ChatGPT prompts the user to take or upload a selfie directly from the interface. Once the image is provided, the system triggers an internal flow that uses Sora to automatically generate a short personalized Christmas video.
The video was created in just a few minutes and features a fully AI-generated Santa Claus addressing the user directly, looking into the camera. The message is crafted as a playful summary of the past year, with semi-personalized narration based on the context and the uploaded image.
In some cases, Santa praises and rewards, in others he gently teases the user, delivering unlikely or symbolically "punishing" gifts. In one example, a simple plate of sushi featured in the selfie is transformed into a surreal Christmas gift, demonstrating Sora's ability to reinterpret objects and environments.
The images, voice, narration, and tone of the message are entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The result is a short, highly emotional video that can be easily saved and shared on social media or in private chats, making it perfect content for the Christmas season.
How to Use ChatGPT Christmas Step-by-Step
To make the most of ChatGPT Christmas It's helpful to follow a simple procedure. The first step is to log in to ChatGPT from a browser or app, using your existing account. No special settings are required: the Easter egg is integrated directly into the standard flow.
At this point, just:
- Send the 🎁 emoji as your only message (without any additional text).
- Wait for the prompt to take or upload a selfie.
- Upload a clear photo of your face, preferably well-lit.
- Confirm and wait for the video to be generated.
Once processed, the video appears directly in the chat. From there, you can play it, download it, or share it on other platforms. Some reports indicate that Christmas emojis like 🎅 or 🎄 can also trigger the same mechanism, but the most consistent behavior is associated with the 🎁 emoji, the heart of the ChatGPT Christmas concept.
From a technological perspective, this flow immediately demonstrates how OpenAI is integrating Sora into ChatGPT, enabling the combination of text, images, and video in the same environment. For those working in digital innovation and generative AI, it's a concrete glimpse of how conversational interfaces could evolve in the coming months.
ChatGPT Christmas Experience Limitations and Constraints
Despite the “wow” effect, ChatGPT Christmas It has some significant limitations. The first concerns creative control: the user cannot influence the final result of the video. It's not possible to choose the style, duration, detailed content, or narrative settings.
In practice, the system autonomously decides how to structure the scene, Santa's dialogue, the jokes, and the "gifts" shown in the video. This approach emphasizes surprise and ease of use, but reduces the possibilities for advanced customization, which is useful in professional or marketing contexts.
A second significant limitation concerns the amount of content that can be generated. Currently, only one video can be created per account: when repeating the process in a new chat, ChatGPT tends to return the same video instead of generating a new one. For those who like to experiment, this restriction limits the variety of experiences available.
The seasonal nature of the Easter egg should also be considered. ChatGPT Christmas is designed specifically for the holiday season, showcasing Sora's potential and the integration of different media types. It's likely that the feature will be deactivated or modified after the holidays, making way for other initiatives.
For a broader understanding of the technology behind Sora and the video generation, it is helpful to consult the public resources on OpenAI and on the generative artificial intelligence, which explain how multimodal models can combine text, images, and motion.
ChatGPT Christmas and AI Content: Opportunities and Risks
The experience of ChatGPT Christmas It should also be seen as an experiment in mass education about AI-generated content. Millions of users can experience firsthand the difference between a simple text message and a video created entirely by a model like Sora, starting from a single selfie.
This dynamic makes the issue of the distinction between real and fake videos even more relevant, especially in an era in which deepfake They're becoming increasingly realistic. In this case, the context is explicitly playful and declared, but the same technologies can also be used in more critical scenarios, as evidenced by the growing international media attention to manipulated content.
For brands, marketers, and communications professionals, it's crucial to understand how these experiences influence user expectations. If a single emoji can trigger such a sophisticated narrative flow, engagement and customer service strategies will also need to adapt, integrating generative AI and conversational automation.
In this sense, the guidelines on digital security and personal data protection published by bodies such as the European Data Protection Board they become an important reference for those who want to adopt similar solutions in corporate contexts.
ChatGPT Christmas: Impact on Marketing and Business
The Easter egg ChatGPT Christmas It's much more than seasonal fun: it's a concrete case study for digital marketing and customer experience. It demonstrates how a simple experience, activated by an emoji, can generate highly shareable and memorable content.
From a marketing perspective, this initiative perfectly leverages three key levers: personalization, storytelling, and virality. The selfie makes the content unique for each user, Santa's narration builds a personalized micro-story, while the short video format is ideal for sharing on social media platforms and messaging apps.
For businesses, this approach suggests new ways to use generative AI in seasonal campaigns. Imagine, for example, a retail brand that allows customers to generate a personalized video message with a virtual testimonial, or an e-commerce company that creates a year-round recap with product recommendations in dynamic video format. The model is the same as ChatGPT Christmas, but applied to business.
In customer experience, the combination of chat, images, and video paves the way for more engaging interactions throughout the customer journey. A conversational flow can be transformed into a thank-you video, a guided tutorial, or a welcome message, increasing engagement compared to text-only communications.
For marketing teams working with WhatsApp Business and messaging channels, these examples show the way forward: intelligent automation, dynamic content, and strong narrative, orchestrated at scale by specialized platforms.
How SendApp Can Help with ChatGPT Christmas
The experience of ChatGPT Christmas It highlights how ready customers are to interact with creative and personalized AI content. For companies, the next step is to bring this logic to channels where the relationship with the user is even more direct, like WhatsApp Business, integrating automation and human conversations.
With SendApp Official, businesses can use the Official WhatsApp APIs To build secure, scalable, and Meta-policy-compliant conversational flows by integrating generative AI and external systems. It's possible to orchestrate seasonal campaigns, personalized greeting messages, and automated post-sales journeys with logic similar to that seen in ChatGPT Christmas.
For the daily management of conversations, SendApp Agent It allows support and sales teams to work collaboratively on the same WhatsApp Business number, distributing contacts among agents, applying tags, and responding quickly. Generative AI can be integrated to suggest replies, create greeting scripts, or personalized micro-stories to send to customers.
When advanced automation is needed, SendApp Cloud It allows you to build multi-channel marketing flows and automated campaigns, scheduling deliveries, segmenting your database, and integrating CRM and external systems. You can create Christmas itineraries with progressive messages, reminders, promotions, and dynamic content inspired by the surprise logic that makes ChatGPT Natale unique.
For businesses that also want a desktop solution, integration with SendApp Desktop It makes it easy to manage WhatsApp campaigns directly from your PC, with templates, address books, and centralized reporting. This way, you can coordinate marketing and customer care teams, measure results, and experiment with new creative ideas based on AI.
If you want to bring the same level of personalization and emotional impact you saw with ChatGPT Christmas to your business, the next step is to design an automation strategy on WhatsApp Business. Contact the SendApp team for a personalized consultation and discover how to leverage AI, automation, and messaging to increase sales, retention, and the quality of your customer relationships.
