The world of rock lost one of its father figures when Ozzy Osbourne, the frontman for legendary British metal band Black Sabbath, sadly died this week, at the age of 76.
Ozzy, as he was affectionately known to his fans, had completed his farewell ‘Back to the Beginning’ concert just three weeks earlier, to rapturous reviews.
As you’d expect, heartfelt tributes to the late self-styled “Price of Darkness” flooded in on my social feeds. My Facebook feed (I’m Gen X, so yes, I still use Facebook, sorry) was full of tributes, but one in particular I found a bit unnerving and off-color…
It was an AI-generated video retrospective through the key moments of Osbourne’s life, like his marriage to Sharon Osbourne, the release of his comeback album No more tears, and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Each moment was represented by a photo, but AI had generated video of Osbourne moving between the photos and getting younger with each one. The overall effect was somewhat unnerving. Especially his transition from wheelchair to throne. See for yourself:
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The overall effect is of a weirdly plastic-skinned, uncanny valley version of Ozzy smiling away at the camera as he grows ever younger and travels back through time.
To make matters worse, the background music to the video is Forever Young by Alphaville from 1992, and while I’ve got nothing against Alphaville, its music cannot remotely be described as being either rock or metal.
That’s not the sort of thing I’d expect to hear on an Ozzy Osbourne video, especially when he has a song like Mamma I’m coming home in his back catalog, which would be more appropriate for a tribute video.
It gets worse – when you look closer at the text on screen, you start to notice mistakes. For example, at the end of the video, it says, “Co-founds Legendary Band Black Sabbat” instead of “Black Sabbath”.
Paranoid?
Then, I found out that there’s a whole collection of these sorts of videos, created for pretty much every famous person who has died relatively recently, or is simply old and still alive! All the videos use the same music. George Michael, Audrey Hepburn, Steve Irwin, the list of celebrities it covers goes on and on.
The whole thing just feels wildly inappropriate, sloppily done, and represents the worst of AI slop. That is, videos generated cheaply using AI simply for garnering views on social platforms.
When Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, talks about a future where AI inspires creativity and lowers the barriers of entry for people to start being creative, he says things like the “upsides will be tremendous for society.”
I really hope these sorts of videos aren’t in the future he’s imagining.