AI videos of dead celebrities are horrifying many of their families (www.washingtonpost.com)

🤖 AI Summary
OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora 2, has been used to create hyperrealistic clips of deceased public figures that are upsetting their families — most visibly, AI-generated footage of Malcolm X making crude jokes, wrestling with Martin Luther King Jr., and talking about defecating on himself. Those examples, widely circulated online, illustrate how generative video models can synthesize lifelike images and audio of people who can’t consent or defend themselves, turning historical figures and celebrities into targets of humiliation or misinformation. For the AI/ML community this raises urgent ethical, technical and policy questions. Technically, it underscores limits of current content provenance and detection: realistic multimodal outputs demand robust watermarking, provenance metadata, and improved synthetic-media detectors. It also highlights dataset and consent issues (training on likenesses of real people), API and model-access controls, and the need for stronger guardrails, red-teaming and moderation workflows before release. Beyond engineering fixes, there are legal and social implications — reputational harm, distortion of history, and emotional trauma for families — that call for coordinated industry standards, clearer platform takedown mechanisms, and regulation to reduce misuse while research on responsible generative models continues.
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