Green Day took a not-so-subtle dig at Will Smith as the musician and rapper faces accusations that he used artificial intelligence to beef up the look of his crowds in a recent video thanking fans.
On TikTok, the band shared a video from one of the recent shows on their South American tour that showed fans crammed up near the stage singing along to “Basket Case.” The video was cheekily captioned, “Don’t need AI for our crowds 😜.”
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Smith is accused of using AI on a tour video of his own, which was shared on social media nearly two weeks ago, but only just recently caught the attention of the wider internet. At first glance, it seemed like a simple post celebrating fans, featuring a montage of crowd shots from his recent European run with the caption, “My favorite part of tour is seeing you all up close. Thank you for seeing me too.”
But the AI allegations stemmed from the fact that some of the faces of the people look distorted and blurry. Some have claimed that audience members have been given extra fingers or oddly formed hands. And others highlighted the hyper-real, overly polished say some fans look in close-up as evidence.
Despite the uproar it’s caused, neither Smith nor his team has commented on the matter. And those who’ve taken it upon themselves to investigate whether AI was used in the clip have come up with mixed answers. One of the most comprehensive analyses was done by tech blogger Andy Baio, who dug around Smith’s Instagram page and found that many of the dubious-looking shots in the video — specifically ones that showed fans holding up signs — already appeared in still photos posted on Smith’s Instagram before the video was released.
Baio and others also noted that Smith’s video could’ve been the victim of an effort at YouTube to artificially alter videos without creators’ knowledge. A spokesperson for YouTube previously admitted to The Atlantic that the company is “running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses image enhancement technology to sharpen content.” The spokesperson added that YouTube is “using traditional machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos.” A side-by-side comparison Baio made with the videos as they appeared on Instagram and YouTube Shorts lends some credence to this theory.
Ultimately, though, Baio and others believed there was enough evidence to suggest some AI was used on Smith’s video, but not with the aim of creating phony swaths of adoring fans. Rather, it seems possible that Smith’s team took some of those aforementioned still photos and put them through, as Baio wrote, an “image-to-video model to create a short animated clip suitable for a concert montage.” (This same kind of tech was just used by filmmaker Andrew Dominik, who animated old still photos of Elvis Presley for a video he created for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Tupelo.”)
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