OpenAI has said it will stop its AI video-generating app Sora from creating videos featuring the likeness of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., after receiving a request from his estate.
The minister and civil rights leader, who was assassinated in April 1968, was known in his lifetime for his advocacy of nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, and sonorous eloquence. Sora has been used to produce videos featuring Dr. King’s likeness delivering the “I have a dream” speech while making monkey noises; another video shows him fighting his contemporary and fellow activist Malcolm X.
OpenAI has admitted this sort of stuff amounts to “disrespectful depictions”, which is putting it mildly, and says it’s stopped users being able to generate videos featuring Dr. King’s likeness “as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures.”
Dr. King is far from the only historical figure to have been reanimated in oft-tasteless fashion. There are videos of JFK’s likeness joking about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk; one showing Kobe Bryant’s likeness on a helicopter with the implication this is from the 2020 crash that killed him, his daughter, and seven others; yet more show Malcolm X’s likeness making crude jokes and discussing defecating on himself.
“It is deeply disrespectful and hurtful to see my father’s image used in such a cavalier and insensitive manner when he dedicated his life to truth,” Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz told the Washington Post.
Earlier this month Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Robin Williams, excoriated the AI ‘tributes’ to her dad (which are less obviously grim than the above, but still): “You’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings […] You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line.”
