Over the past few years, actor, rapper, and slapper Will Smith has been the subject of a grotesque meme in AI is used to show him gobbling down on nightmarish squelching spaghetti.
It now seems that the 56-year-old "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" star's team has used the tech to soup up concert footage from his would-be comeback tour — and it strongly appears that the purpose was to make an underwhelming crowd look like they're still filled with love for Smith's much-lampooned career trajectory.
Posted recently on YouTube and Instagram, the minute-long video from Smith's "Based on a True Story" tour shows the "Wild Wild West" actor performing onstage for what in the video looks at first glance like a packed crowd of adoring fans, many of whom are experiencing emotional outbursts and holding signs about how impactful he's been in their lives.
The problem, as online observers quickly pointed out, is that many segments of the video are clearly either AI-generated entirely, or at least severely altered using the tech.
Don't believe us? Just look at this gentleman who appears partway through, his passion for Will Smith expressed through an inverted rictus never before seen on a living human face as he holds aloft a sign saying that Smith's mostly forgotten 2024 single "You Can Make It" helped him "survive cancer." For extra nightmare fuel, check out some of those visages in the background — and oh yeah, why is another person's hand morphing into the man's grasp on his sign?
Not enough evidence for you? Just take a look — no, really look — at this ghoulish crowd scene, where tormented-looking faces melt together under a banner, held aloft by no one in particular, that reads "From West Philly to West Swiggy, we [heart] you Will" in AI-garbled lettering with strange markings beside it.
Scrambling the situation further, the video seems to be an uncanny mixture of real footage of Smith and distant crowd scenes, mixed with closeups of rapturous fans that are either completely fake or edited into unintentionally hilarious caricature. (It's also worth noting that the crowd in the video is almost entirely white, for some reason.)
On social, reactions were brutal.
"Just a mess of blurry half-faces, hands with 7 fingers, phones that have been crossed with old fashioned cameras, foreheads disappearing into nowhere etc," one viewer wrote. "There's not a trace of human in that shot."
Interestingly, the video isn't labeled on either YouTube or Instagram as containing AI-generated content, which YouTube has tacitly required for nearly 18 months and Meta, the owner of Instagram, has required for nearly as long.
... continue reading