People Are Still Using AI to Resurrect Dead Celebrities

Earlier this year, Rod Stewart faced criticism after showing an AI-generated video during one of his concerts that featured the recently-departed Ozzy Osbourne encountering other deceased musicians in the afterlife. As InsideHook managing editor Bonnie Stiernberg observed at the time, “digitally commanding someone’s likeness to do whatever you feel like having them do when they’re no longer alive to object is unethical.”

Sadly, the backlash to Stewart’s video has not ended this practice. And now several family members of deceased public figures have gone public with their objections to seeing AI-generated videos featuring their dead relatives. Earlier this week, Zelda Williams — daughter of Robin Williams — took to Instagram to ask fans of her father to stop sending her AI-generated videos of him.

“[P}lease, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop,” she wrote, according to the BBC. “It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”

Robin Williams is not the only celebrity whose living relatives are concerned about deepfakes surfacing of their loved ones. In an article for The Washington Post, Tatum Hunter and Drew Harwell pointed out that other descendents of well-known people, including Ilyasah Shabazz (Malcolm X’s daughter) and Bernice King (Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter), have also been appalled to see their loved ones’ likenesses showing up in AI-generated videos.

Please Stop Using AI to Reanimate the Dead

Rod Stewart is facing backlash over his AI-generated video of Ozzy Osbourne posing for selfies in heaven with other dead musicians

Hunter and Harwell cite the release of a new version of Sora as a factor in making these kinds of videos even more widespread. The videos described in the Post‘s article take a wide range of approaches, from ostensibly well-intentioned tributes to racist slop. Given that Sora reached over a million downloads less than a week after its launch, this trend may well continue to advance — even as more and more voices point out that it’s a terrible idea.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…