SHAMS RASHID TONMOY

A new, and deeply unsettling, trend is flooding social media feeds. It is not a dance challenge or a recipe video. It is the digital resurrection of deceased celebrities, all generated by artificial intelligence. Albert Einstein as a UFC fighter. Tupac Shakur hanging out with Elvis Presley. A stand-up routine from Michael Jackson. This is the latest frontier of AI content, and it is raising urgent questions about consent, taste, and who gets to control a person’s legacy after they are gone.

The source of this trend is OpenAI’s new Sora 2 video generator. The company launched the tool with promises of safety, stating it would block depictions of public figures. However, it turns out this prohibition has a significant loophole: it only applies to the living. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to tech magazine PCMag that the company “allows the generation of historical figures”. This policy has opened the floodgates for users to create videos featuring anyone from Albert Einstein to Kurt Cobain, without any permission from their families or estates.

For living individuals, Sora 2 offers a ‘cameo’ feature. This allows a person to scan their own face and voice, giving them control over how their digital likeness is used. But this system completely fails the deceased. They cannot opt in. They cannot revoke consent. They are, in effect, digital props for anyone with an idea and an app.

The human impact of this is very real. Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Robin Williams, recently pleaded to stop sending her AI videos of her father. In an Instagram post, she called the recreations a “horrendous Frankensteinian monster”, stating emphatically that it is not what he would have wanted. Her distress highlights a core problem: these AI resurrections are not just a technical novelty; they can cause genuine pain to grieving families and fans who feel a beloved figure is being disrespected.

Legally, the situation is a minefield. According to a recent article by US-based news website Arcs Technica, in the United States, laws governing the use of a deceased person’s likeness vary from state to state. Some, like New York, have laws against using a “digital replica” in a way that could deceive the public. However, these can often be bypassed with a simple disclaimer. The result is a legal grey area where estates may soon be forced to launch lawsuits to protect their loved ones’ images.

Perhaps the most ironic twist is seeing figures who warned about AI’s dangers being used to promote it. Stephen Hawking famously expressed concern about super intelligent AI, yet he is now one of the most frequently simulated celebrities, often in violent or humiliating scenarios.

OpenAI has shown it can change its policies when faced with backlash, as it recently did by shifting to an opt-in model for copyrighted characters. But by explicitly allowing historical figures, the company is essentially endorsing this new form of digital grave robbing.

As these videos continue to spread, the countdown to the first major legal challenge begins. Until then, the digital afterlife of our most cherished figures remains in the hands of internet strangers, and the ethics feel deader than the celebrities they are reviving.