{"id":33007,"date":"2025-08-30T14:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/33007\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T14:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:11:09","slug":"will-smith-ai-tour-video-is-beginning-of-ai-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/33007\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Smith AI Tour Video Is Beginning of AI Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s a little funny that Will Smith<\/a>\u2019s celebrity may be getting dinged by an AI act he did. Because AI gained its celebrity from something Will Smith didn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy now you may have heard the allegations of AI in Smith\u2019s live performance of his new song \u201cYou Can Make It\u201d to adoring crowds tearing up and holding signs in an undisclosed location, or even seen the strange smoothings and distortions yourself.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut back in early 2023, a video<\/a> of Smith eating spaghetti went viral because it was AI. Smith never ate that spaghetti, but that didn\u2019t stop so many of us from oohing over what the new tech could do. A year removed from The Slap, we didn\u2019t know we felt about Will Smith. But we suddenly loved AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTwo years later, Smith was allegedly using AI to go viral \u2026 and walking off a cliff.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe new video is likely \u2014 though no one has confirmed it \u2014 the result of \u201cupscaling,\u201d a kind of AI enhancement that can make it seem like humans in your shot were either there in greater numbers or with more excitement than they really were. <\/p>\n

\n\tPeople tearing up when they weren\u2019t crying, or people holding up signs they never raised or people not really people at all \u2014 the whole thing is meant to give an impression of Smith\u2019s popularity. \u201cMy favorite part of tour is seeing you all up close. Thank you for seeing me too,\u201d Smith wrote on social. Sleuths who zeroed in on the blended hands and inverted words could only smirk at the irony. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tA video posted Aug. 12 to Will Smith\u2019s official YouTube page racked up 450,000 views \u2014 but was scrutinized for tell-tale signs of AI enhancement, like too many fingers\u00a0or signs being held in an un-human way, in a process known as \u201cupscaling.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith\u2019s video in one sense offers a singular phenomenon. Here was a former A-lister many of us had cooled to unwittingly proving the very point he was coming to negate. Has there even been a more cringe act by a massive movie star? Has there been a more sus use of AI? If you\u2019re going to pull a muscle telling us how much people love you, at least find some real people to do it. This seemed so thirsty, so\u00a0unjiggy.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut we may want to hit pause on the celebrity schadenfreude. Because Smith\u2019s act is not singular at all. It is something universal, or at least soon-to-be universal. 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\u2019s only going to grow more popular as the tools get better. (And they will \u2014 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, \u201cRemember when Will Smith did something cringily AI?\u201d and more, \u201cRemember when AI was still seen as so cringe that we made fun of Will Smith for it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tExperts differ on the timeline, but everyone agrees it\u2019s just years if not months before we\u2019ll stop being able to spot an AI video. \u201cYou Can Make It\u201d had the particular misfortune of coming out at this interregnum moment: good enough for someone to use but not so good we can\u2019t spot it. That moment will be over soon enough, and, I suspect, so will our pearl-clutching.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u2014 incontrovertible evidence that an event took place the way it seemed to.<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce this happens, the industry consequences will follow. Publicists will sputter trying to dazzle us with something we know could be AI (I wouldn\u2019t want to be Tom Cruise\u2019s handler when he shoots his next stunt sequence) or dissuade us that their client didn\u2019t do the thing the video says they did. Brand managers will be at a loss attempting similar damage control. And forget media companies. Your stock-in-trade as a TV news division is landing the video no one else has. Now even if you did, who\u2019d believe it?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe effects on democracy will be even more devastating. If you think political disinformation is bad now, imagine when any video can look like anything. Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor who\u2019s spent years studying this stuff, told me just that recently: \u201cIt will get to the point where it will be exceedingly difficult to tell AI content without real interventions \u2026 [and] if pretty much anybody can create content that is this deceptive, we are in trouble, as a democracy and a society.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut there is an upside. (Really.) Without a format that can telegraph objectivity, we\u2019ll 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe phenomenon will cut across all parts of the landscape. Still, there is a final irony in who\u2019s playing it out \u2014 the person who, from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Men in Black to Bad\u202fBoys to King Richard, has dominated our visual media for 35 years. Call it The\u202fWill Smith Paradox. The man who made us most believe in the power of images now shapes a trend in which we may never trust them again. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a little funny that Will Smith\u2019s celebrity may be getting dinged by an AI act he did.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,19,17,82,23668],"class_list":{"0":"post-33007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-will-smith"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}