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Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines
Will Smith is being accused of generating fake fans with AI, but it's complicated: the crowds are real, but the videos were manipulated by Smith's team and YouTube itself.
One of the most egregious examples is the couple holding the sign thanking Will Smith for helping them survive cancer which — if it was AI-generated slop — would be pretty disgusting: a gross attempt to drum up sympathy with fake people. That explains why the entire YouTube Shorts video has that smeary look to it that isn’t present throughout the copy posted on Instagram, but both versions have those terrible audience shots with AI artifacts and garbled signage. We can debate the ethics of using an image-to-video model to animate photos in this way, but I think it’s meaningfully different than what most people were accusing Will Smith of doing here: using generative AI video to fake a sold-out crowd of passionate fans.
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