AI is famously convenient but unreliable, and the Rolling Stones learned this lesson the hard way when making their recent video for “In the Stars,” when AI accidentally inserted Jeff Beck into the band.
The clip uses deepfake technology to de-age the octogenarian band, portraying them as their younger selves as they perform the single from their newly released Foreign Tongues. “It was only AI with the faces,” singer Mick Jagger explained during an appearance on the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “Everything else is real.”
They used the 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil as a reference point for Jagger and Richards’s deepfake appearances. Guitarist Ronnie Wood wasn’t in that film, however, since he didn’t join the band until 1975, meaning that they needed to source footage from his pre-Stones projects — including when he played in the Jeff Beck Group in the late ’60s. This led to AI getting a little confused about who was who.
“We were talking with the lady that I’m working with on the video,” Jagger recalled. “They’re doing this AI, and I said, ‘Stop it at 3:18!’ We’re on a Zoom. I said, ‘Stop it at 3:18!’ I said, ‘That’s Jeff Beck! That’s not your guy!’ The thing was that Ronnie was in a band with Jeff Beck. So they might have gone back to this footage and said, ‘Please don’t bother me about this. I know exactly who these people are.’ And it looked exactly like Jeff Beck. So we had Jeff Beck in the band for a minute there. That was interesting. So I said, ‘No, you’ve got to change it to Ronnie!'”
Well at least the humans were paying attention! See the video below, and read Exclaim!’s review of Foreign Tongues here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source exclaim.ca ’













