Will Smith posted a video on social media that shows oceans of fans cheering him on during his recent European tour.
“My favorite part of the tour is seeing you all up close,” the caption says. “Thank you for seeing me too.”
In these thousands-deep crowds, some fans are holding up signs espousing their love for Smith, with one even saying that his music helped them survive cancer.
But the video gives off an odd aura — it looks believably real at first glance, until you look closer and find digitally mangled faces, nonsensical finger placements, and oddly augmented features across the series of clips.
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The video looks strange enough that fans responded with accusations that the crowd footage was created using AI. It’s bad news for Smith, who’s already suffered reputational damage after “the slap.” If he were using AI to make his concerts look more impressive, or even spinning up stories of fans using his music to cope with cancer treatment, that would be pretty indefensible.
These fans aren’t fake, though — or at least, that’s our best guess. (There’s not a reliable way to determine whether content was created using AI, which has made the current online landscape a nightmare of misinformation.)
As tech blogger Andy Baio pointed out, Will Smith has posted photos and videos throughout his tour that show some of the same fans and signs depicted in the questionable video.
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There’s nothing about these older posts that indicates that the photos and videos are synthetic, yet when they’re depicted in this new video, they look like they’ve been generated using AI. It seems like Smith’s team has collaged real footage with AI-generated videos that use real crowd photos as source images, which makes the video even more difficult to interpret.
The images on the left are taken from an allegedly AI-generated video on Will Smith’s social media, whereas the images on the right were uploaded previously.Image Credits:Will Smith on Instagram (opens in a new window)
But social media audiences will not take the time to scroll through past Will Smith posts, find evidence that a fan really did listen to his music during cancer treatment, and give him the benefit of the doubt. What fans will take away from …