Did Will Smith Upload an AI-Enhanced Video - and Is This Just the Beginning? (hollywoodreporter.com)
(Saturday August 30, 2025 @05:09PM (EditorDavid)
from the rise-of-the-machines dept.)
- Reference: 0178947954
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/30/215236/did-will-smith-upload-an-ai-enhanced-video---and-is-this-just-the-beginning
- Source link: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/will-smith-ai-tour-video-artificial-intelligence-1236357541/
After Will Smith uploaded a video of an adoring crowd, blogger Andy Baio "conducted a detailed [1]analysis that suggests Will Smith's team might have used AI to turn photos from his recent concerts into videos," [2]writes BGR . But there's more to the story:
> Google recently ran an experiment for YouTube Shorts in which it used AI (machine learning) to improve the quality of Shorts without asking the creator for permission. People complained the videos looked like they were AI generated. It seems that Will Smith's YouTube Shorts clip that attracted criticism from fans this week might have been a victim of this experiment... The signs are real. The man who claimed Will Smith's song helped him cure cancer was there. The woman in front of him was holding the sign with him. The "Lov U" sign appeared in photos the singer posted on his social media channels before the clip was shared.
"Will Smith has not denied the use of AI in these promotional clips," the article adds.
But the Hollywood Reporter also calls it " [3]just the beginning of AI chaos ," noting that "influencers and spinmeisters have been using AI upscaling for years, if quietly, the way you might round up your current salary in a job interview."
> It's only going to grow more popular as the tools get better. (And they will — you just need some tweaks to the model and increases in compute to erase these hallucinations.) In fact, when the chapter on the early AI Age is written, the line about this moment is less likely to be, "Remember when Will Smith did something cringily AI?" and more, "Remember when AI was still seen as so cringe that we made fun of Will Smith for it?" Experts differ on the timeline, but everyone agrees it's just years if not months before we'll stop being able to spot an AI video. [Will Smith's video] had the particular misfortune of coming out at this interregnum moment: good enough for someone to use but not so good we can't spot it.
>
> That moment will be over soon enough, and, I suspect, so will our pearl-clutching. The main effect of this new age of the synthetic is that video will stop being a meaningful measure of truth. We have long stopped believing everything we read, and AI image-generators have killed what photoshop wounded. But video until now has been the last bastion of objectivity — incontrovertible evidence that an event took place the way it seemed to....
>
> But there is an upside. (Really.) Without a format that can telegraph objectivity, we'll need to (if we care to) turn to other ways to assure ourselves of the facts: the source of the video. That could mean the human-led content creator will matter more. After years of seeing news brands take a beating in the trust department, they'll soon become the only hope we have of knowing whether something happened. We no longer will be able to trust the medium. But we may newly believe the media.
[1] https://waxy.org/2025/08/will-smiths-concert-crowds-were-real-but-ai-is-blurring-the-lines/
[2] https://www.bgr.com/1953728/will-smith-ai-crowd-concert-video-explanation/
[3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/will-smith-ai-tour-video-artificial-intelligence-1236357541/
> Google recently ran an experiment for YouTube Shorts in which it used AI (machine learning) to improve the quality of Shorts without asking the creator for permission. People complained the videos looked like they were AI generated. It seems that Will Smith's YouTube Shorts clip that attracted criticism from fans this week might have been a victim of this experiment... The signs are real. The man who claimed Will Smith's song helped him cure cancer was there. The woman in front of him was holding the sign with him. The "Lov U" sign appeared in photos the singer posted on his social media channels before the clip was shared.
"Will Smith has not denied the use of AI in these promotional clips," the article adds.
But the Hollywood Reporter also calls it " [3]just the beginning of AI chaos ," noting that "influencers and spinmeisters have been using AI upscaling for years, if quietly, the way you might round up your current salary in a job interview."
> It's only going to grow more popular as the tools get better. (And they will — you just need some tweaks to the model and increases in compute to erase these hallucinations.) In fact, when the chapter on the early AI Age is written, the line about this moment is less likely to be, "Remember when Will Smith did something cringily AI?" and more, "Remember when AI was still seen as so cringe that we made fun of Will Smith for it?" Experts differ on the timeline, but everyone agrees it's just years if not months before we'll stop being able to spot an AI video. [Will Smith's video] had the particular misfortune of coming out at this interregnum moment: good enough for someone to use but not so good we can't spot it.
>
> That moment will be over soon enough, and, I suspect, so will our pearl-clutching. The main effect of this new age of the synthetic is that video will stop being a meaningful measure of truth. We have long stopped believing everything we read, and AI image-generators have killed what photoshop wounded. But video until now has been the last bastion of objectivity — incontrovertible evidence that an event took place the way it seemed to....
>
> But there is an upside. (Really.) Without a format that can telegraph objectivity, we'll need to (if we care to) turn to other ways to assure ourselves of the facts: the source of the video. That could mean the human-led content creator will matter more. After years of seeing news brands take a beating in the trust department, they'll soon become the only hope we have of knowing whether something happened. We no longer will be able to trust the medium. But we may newly believe the media.
[1] https://waxy.org/2025/08/will-smiths-concert-crowds-were-real-but-ai-is-blurring-the-lines/
[2] https://www.bgr.com/1953728/will-smith-ai-crowd-concert-video-explanation/
[3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/will-smith-ai-tour-video-artificial-intelligence-1236357541/
Re: (Score:2)
by QuantumLeaper ( 607189 )
Reality is better than AI in this story.
The Real Terminator (Score:3)
by locater16 ( 2326718 )
The year is 2063, a video of a concert gets uploaded to youtube. A totally real band plays to a totally real Coachella crowd that spreads out for hundreds of miles into the distance. The video has twenty three trillion likes from totally real people. The last actual human died of starvation a decade ago watching AI slop while waiting for an AI delivered doordash that got stuck in a bootloop, but the AI show goes on unabated.
You don't own your name, image, and likeness in Am (Score:1)
by LOGINS SUC ( 713291 )
You don't own your name, image, and likeness (NIL) in America unless you've trademarked yourself. They belong to the voyeurs recording them; nevermind AI facsimiles and (mis)representations... A brave new world, indeed. Did Will Smith claim the video at all?
It was better when he just ate spaghetti (Score:2)
by doragasu ( 2717547 )
Those were fun times
Rich get richer! (Score:2)
They no longer have to pay for actors to pretend to be fans, they can AI-generate them to try and convince you they're still beloved.