OpenAI Bans MLK Deepfakes On Sora 2 At Family’s Request 

AI company OpenAI announced on Thursday that it would be “pausing” users’ ability to create deepfake videos of Martin Luther King Jr. following a request from the King estate. 

According to CNN, OpenAI’s Sora 2 platform launched earlier this month and has quickly become one of the most downloaded apps on digital storefronts. This rapid adoption of the platform has led to the growing spread of weird and downright disrespectful depictions of several historical figures. While OpenAI requires living people to opt in to having their likeness used on Sora 2, there were no such guardrails for dead historical figures. At least, there weren’t until the King Estate stepped in. 

“The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King’s image,” a joint statement from OpenAI and the King Estate, Inc., read. “So at King, Inc.’s request, OpenAI has paused generations depicting Dr. King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures.”

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“While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, OpenAI believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used,” the statement added. As a result of the King Estate’s request, OpenAI will now allow estate owners and authorized family members to request that the likeness of dead historical figures not be used. 

MLK’s family isn’t the only estate upset with how Sora 2 has been used to depict historical figures. “It is deeply disrespectful and hurtful to see my father’s image used in such a cavalier and insensitive manner when he dedicated his life to truth,” Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter, told the Washington Post. She added that she didn’t understand why OpenAI’s developers weren’t moving “with the same morality, conscience, and care … that they’d want for their own families.”

Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, pleaded on Instagram for people to stop sending her AI videos of her father. “To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to … horrible, TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening,” she said.

Henry Ajder, an AI expert, coined the term “synthetic resurrection” to describe the use of AI to create digital recreations of the dead. “The amount and the volume of this kind of synthetic resurrection content is just huge now,” Ajder told the Washington Post. “And it’s not being done by creative agencies in partnership with the estate … or by a Hollywood studio as a tribute to a much-loved actor or actress, with consent from their family. It’s being done by s—posters, memesters, racists, and all the rest.”

The lack of initial guardrails, while not surprising, shows the general callousness with which OpenAI and the tech industry at large operate. They released this technology to the public without any real consideration of the human cost. It’s like these people watched Jurassic Park and came away with the conclusion that, actually, John Hammond was right, and it was everyone else’s fault they got eaten by the dinosaurs. 

All of this AI nonsense just makes me feel old, y’all. I’ve yet to see an AI video that’s actually wowed or entertained me. The general impression I’ve gotten from the few videos that’ve entered my feed is that it’s content slop made by the least interesting people and consumed by the easily entertained. In a world where there are so many incredible classic films I still haven’t seen, amazing books I haven’t read, and great albums I haven’t listened to, why waste time on a platform that’s actively harming the environment, poisoning Black communities, and disrespecting civil rights legends like MLK and Malcolm X? Couldn’t be me. 

SEE ALSO:

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OpenAI Bans MLK Deepfakes On Sora 2 At Family’s Request   was originally published on newsone.com