Will Smith performs live onstage during the “Based On A True Story” Summer Tour at Festhalle Frankfurt on July 18, 2025 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Rentz\/Getty Images) | Image Credits:Andreas Rentz \/ Getty Images <\/p>\n
Will Smith posted a video<\/a> on social media that shows oceans of fans cheering him on during his recent European tour.<\/p>\n \u201cMy favorite part of the tour is seeing you all up close,\u201d the caption says. \u201cThank you for seeing me too.\u201d<\/p>\n In these thousands-deep crowds, some fans are holding up signs espousing their love for Smith, with one even saying that his music helped them survive cancer.<\/p>\n But the video gives off an odd aura \u2014 it looks believably real at first glance, until you look closer and find digitally mangled faces, nonsensical finger placements, and oddly augmented features across the series of clips.<\/p>\n The video looks strange enough that fans responded with accusations<\/a> that the crowd footage was created using AI. It\u2019s bad news for Smith, who\u2019s already suffered reputational damage after \u201cthe slap<\/a>.\u201d If he were using AI to make his concerts look more impressive, or even spinning up stories of fans using his music to cope with cancer treatment, that would be pretty indefensible.<\/p>\n These fans aren\u2019t fake, though \u2014 or at least, that\u2019s our best guess. (There\u2019s not a reliable way to determine whether content was created using AI, which has made the current online landscape a nightmare of misinformation.)<\/p>\n As tech blogger Andy Baio pointed out<\/a>, Will Smith has posted photos and videos throughout his tour that show some of the same fans and signs depicted in the questionable video.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing about these older posts that indicates that the photos and videos are synthetic, yet when they\u2019re depicted in this new video, they look like they\u2019ve been generated using AI. It seems like Smith\u2019s team has collaged real footage with AI-generated videos that use real crowd photos as source images, which makes the video even more difficult to interpret.<\/p>\n But social media audiences will not take the time to scroll through past Will Smith posts, find evidence that a fan really did listen to his music during cancer treatment, and give him the benefit of the doubt. What fans will take away from the post is that Smith is posting fake videos of his fans, which is deeply cringe, even if the reality is a bit less egregious.<\/p>\n It\u2019s bad timing for Smith, too, that YouTube had recently begun testing<\/a> a feature that would use \u201ctraditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity\u201d on some Shorts posts \u2014 these edits made Smith\u2019s YouTube Short look even more fake than the videos on other platforms.<\/p>\n The images on the left are taken from an allegedly AI-generated video on Will Smith\u2019s social media, whereas the images on the right were uploaded previously.Image Credits:<\/strong>Will Smith on Instagram (opens in a new window)<\/a> <\/p>\n