We’ve been railing against using hologram technology to allow deceased musicians to “perform” live again for years now, but as AI becomes more and more commonplace, there are new, equally horrific ways to reanimate our favorite departed performers. The most recent example? A bizarre tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne on Rod Stewart’s current tour that involves the late Black Sabbath frontman posing for selfies with other famously dead celebrities in heaven.
Stewart has (rightly) caught heat on social media for the AI-generated video, which features Osbourne using a selfie stick to pose with Janis Joplin, Prince, Tina Turner, Bob Marley, 2Pac, Aaliyah, Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Kurt Cobain, XXXTentacion, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse and plays on the screen as Stewart performs “Forever Young.” (Something about the idea of selfie sticks in heaven feels wrong to me. Those things belong in hell.) As one fan who captured video of the clip and posted it to Instagram wrote, “This is the craziest most disrespectful shit I ever saw in my LIFE!!!”
It must be said again: digitally commanding someone’s likeness to do whatever you feel like having them do when they’re no longer alive to object is unethical. Even if Stewart’s intentions were good and he thought he was simply honoring a friend who recently passed away, the result is some sort of grotesque Weekend at Bernie‘s situation. In attempting to honor Osbourne, Stewart is also exploiting a whole lot of other musicians who — save for Turner, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 83 — all died young. None of them are able to sign off on appearing alongside Osbourne, obviously, and at least one of them was very vocal about not being okay with being digitally regenerated after he’s gone.
Way back in 1998, Prince was asked what he thought about artists using digital editing to jam with legendary deceased artists. His response? “That’s the most demonic thing imaginable. Everything is as it is, and it should be. If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age. That whole virtual reality thing … it really is demonic. And I am not a demon. Also, what they did with that Beatles song [“Free as a Bird”], manipulating John Lennon’s voice to have him singing from across the grave … that’ll never happen to me. To prevent that kind of thing from happening is another reason why I want artistic control.”
It’s pretty difficult to misinterpret that statement, which means that by including Prince in the Osbourne “Eternal Stars” video, whoever put it together for Stewart was intentionally ignoring the wishes of a dead man and basically propping up his corpse against his will. And what even was the criteria used to select who appears in the video, other than “is dead”? How do we know for sure, for example, that Osbourne would willingly smile and pose next to XXXTentacion, who was caught on tape admitting to beating an ex-girlfriend and stabbing nine people? Shouldn’t that type of bad decision at least be his to make, instead of some soulless AI bot’s?
As AI technology continues to become more omnipresent in our daily lives, these sort of ethical dilemmas are only going to continue to crop up. But the answer will always be the same: using AI to make a dead person your personal marionette is creepy and wrong.
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