Will Smith has been accused of using artificial intelligence to generate an adoring crowd ahead of his recent concert in the UK. The e Hollywood actor and rapper is currently performing in multiple cities across Europe and international festivals — his first headlining tour in almost 20 years. Promotion of his new album ‘Based on a True Story’ and eponymous Summer Tour took an unfortunate turn after the actor-musician uploaded a video thanking fans.
“My favourite part of tour is seeing you all up close. Thank you for seeing me too,” he posted on YouTube ahead of a Sunday show in the UK.
The video was shared as an YouTube short his official channel last week as Smith kicked off the UK leg of his tour with the Scarborough concert. Eagle-eyed netizens soon noticed that many in the cheering audience had blurry or distorted faces while others had oddly shaped hands with six fingers. Both are commons signs of AI-generated images since the technology often struggles to generate a realistic approximation.
‘Degenerative slop’
The post has since gone viral for all the wrong reasons and left many fans disappointed. Some claimed that most of aspects of the upload were ‘fake’ — alleging heavy use of AI as well as bot comments in his support.
“Imagine being this rich and famous and having to use AI footage of crowds and bot comments on your video. Tragic, man. You used to be cool,” fumed one YouTube comment
“So not only is this an abomination to look at because it’s low quality phone footage that’s been heavily AI upscaled, but there’s also in-between scenes that are clearly AI-generated. Videographers exist, why abandon quality work for this degenerative slop? Also the comments section is littered with bots. Dead internet reality folks, lets be mindful of what we interact with online and foster some strong communities outside,” wrote another while sharing timestamps for the AI moments.
Smith and his team have not addressed the backlash — leaving many to speculate whether the AI use was intentional, a technical edit or a mistake related to video processing on platforms such as YouTube Shorts.
Signs of AI usage
Warped facial features and weirdly-shaped hands with an unlikely number of fingers has become of the the most identifiable AI gaffes in recent months. Artificial intelligence models often struggle to generate realistic iterations of human features because of their complexity. In many cases the AI datasets also lack sufficient detailed reference images. Distortion can also be caused due to insufficient pixels or resolution in the original video.
A recent study from Peking University and Tencent found that nearly half of the 5,000 AI-generated human images they studied exhibited such distortions including extra or missing fingers, deformed extremities, and warped faces.