Will Smith posted a video on social media showing a sea of fans cheering for him during his recent tour of Europe.
“My favorite part of the tour is seeing you nearby,” the caption says. “Thank you for meeting me too.”
Among these thousands of deep crowds, some fans have held signs of support for their love for Smith.
However, the video emits a strange aura. At first glance, it looks incredibly authentic.
The video looked odd enough, and fans responded with accusations that footage of the crowd was created using AI. Bad news for Smith, who has already suffered a reputational damage after “Slap.” If he was using AI to make his concerts look more impressive, or if he even spins up his fan stories to deal with cancer treatments with his music, it can be pretty defensive.
However, these fans are not fake. At least that’s our best guess. (There is no reliable way to determine whether content was created using AI that made the current online landscape a nightmare of misinformation.)
As technology blogger Andy Bio pointed out, Will Smith posted photos and videos during his tour, showing some of the same fans and autographs depicted in the suspicious video.
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There is nothing about these older posts that indicates that the photos and videos are composite, but when depicted in this new video, they appear to have been generated using AI. It appears that Smith’s team is collageing the real footage with video generated by AI, which uses real cloud photos as source images. This makes interpreting the video even more difficult.
However, social media viewers don’t take the time to scroll through past Will Smith posts, finding evidence that fans actually listened to his music during cancer treatment, giving him the bounty of doubt. What fans are robbing from the post is that Smith is posting fake videos of his fans. This is deeply disgusting, even if the reality isn’t a little bad.
For Smith, it was a bad time that YouTube began testing its feature “Improve traditional machine learning technology blur, detheroid and clarity” with a few shorts posts. These edits have edited even more fake appearances than videos on other platforms.
YouTube creator Liaison Rene Ritchie shared that the platform will allow creators to opt out of this feature.
You can argue that Will Smith is not cheating on fans. His team can argue that using AI to generate footage from photos to create more visually appealing social media posts and that this practice can be compared to other formats of video editing.
But fans don’t see it like this. The public is more resistant to generative AI technologies than existing creative tools such as AutoTune and Photoshop. But even in those cases, many fans are turned off in a way that feels dishonest by artists who rely on these tools.
If fans buy tickets to watch the pop star, but his terrible voice is autotuned, he finds that his recordings are only sounding good, they feel cheated. This is like shooting a model to promote a model’s moisturizer, just edit the acne from the model’s face.
When an artist breaks the trust of the viewer, it’s hard to get it back, even if you’re a fresh prince of Bel Air.
