Furious backlash to ‘evil’ new celebrity AI videos

“Ghoulish” videos depicting dead celebrities reunited with their surviving loved ones have been met with a furious reaction on social media.

A series of AI-generated videos depicting dead celebrities reunited with their living counterparts have been met with a furious reaction on social media.

X user Min Choi, who describes himself as an ‘AI educator,’ posted a thread on the platform to demonstrate the capabilities of new “state-of-the-art AI assistant” Grok-2.

Calling Grok-2 “insane,” he raved that “it’s the best AI image model that can generate photorealistic people right now.”

And to demonstrate, he shared a thread of short, AI-generated videos, each depicting two celebrities, one living, one dead. Some were relatively innocuous: Dolly Parton, cuddled up to Elvis Presley. Beyonce striking a pose with Michael Jackson. A-list film stars James Dean and Tom Cruise, somehow meeting despite the fact Dean died seven years before Cruise was born.

Others were more distasteful: Choi opened the thread with a video showing Paul McCartney posing with Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who was brutally murdered in 1980.

But it was the choice to have several famous people reunited with the parents they lost at a young age that left many horrified.

Controversial celeb A.I. posts on social media.

Controversial celeb A.I. posts on social media.

Two posts showed Princes William and Harry posing with Princess Diana, the mother they lost in a 1997 car accident when they were only children.

And another short video showed Australian conservation icon Steve Irwin, who died in 2006, alongside adult daughter Bindi, who was just eight years old when he died.

That post, showing the AI-generated pair grinning and hugging, provoked a strong reaction on X, where it has been viewed more than two million times.

The overwhelming sentiment: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Controversial celeb A.I. posts on social media.

“This is genuinely f***ed up and I think you should take a hard look at yourself for putting this into the world,” one person wrote.

“Extremely disrespectful and distasteful,” another fumed.

Another called the posts “evil,” writing: “This are real human beings, who have suffered real human tragedies. Not toys for you to play dolls with.”

Another labelled the AI videos “absolutely f**king ghoulish.”

A young Bindi with father Steve in 2003. Picture: AAP

Using celebrity likenesses in AI-generated photos and video is an already controversial issue.

Back in August, President-elect Donald Trump shared AI images showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, which included an image of Swift clad in an Uncle Sam outfit and instructing her fans to vote for Trump, the former president wrote: “I accept!”

Swift later publicly slammed the false images, declaring her intention to vote for Kamala Harris.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site,” she wrote. “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation.”

Originally published as Furious backlash to ‘evil’ new celebrity AI videos