From Hollywood Reporter
Why the Will Smith Video Is Just the Beginning of AI Chaos
By Steven Zeitchik
It’s a little funny that Will Smith’s celebrity may be getting dinged by an AI act he did. Because AI gained its celebrity from something Will Smith didn’t do.
By now you may have heard the allegations of AI in Smith’s live performance of his new song “You Can Make It” to adoring crowds tearing up and holding signs in an undisclosed location, or even seen the strange smoothings and distortions yourself.
But back in early 2023, a video of Smith eating spaghetti went viral because it was AI. Smith never ate that spaghetti, but that didn’t stop so many of us from oohing over what the new tech could do. A year removed from The Slap, we didn’t know we felt about Will Smith. But we suddenly loved AI...
The effects on democracy will be even more devastating. If you think political disinformation is bad now, imagine when any video can look like anything. Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor who’s spent years studying this stuff, told me just that recently: “It will get to the point where it will be exceedingly difficult to tell AI content without real interventions … [and] if pretty much anybody can create content that is this deceptive, we are in trouble, as a democracy and a society...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
