OpenAI pauses Sora AI videos of Martin Luther King Jr. due to ‘inappropriate’ deepfakes flooding the app

OpenAI will no longer allow its users to create AI fake images of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on its Sora AI social media app. This decision highlights the intense conflict between AI companies and rights holders like celebrity estates, movie studios, and talent agencies — and how the AI ​​technology produced continues to undermine reality for all of us.

Sora, a new sister app to ChatGPT, allows users Create and share AI-generated videos. It was launched to great fanfare three weeks ago, and AI enthusiasts have been searching for it Invitation codes. But Sora is unique among AI-powered video generators and social media apps; It lets you use other people’s recorded likenesses to put into almost any AI-powered video. It was, at best, bizarre and funny – and at worst, An endless scroll of deepfakes Which is almost indistinguishable from reality.

OpenAI has guardrails to prevent the creation of videos of famous people: for example, it rejected my request for a video of Taylor Swift on stage. But these guardrails aren’t perfect, as we saw this week with a growing trend of people creating videos featuring King. They’ve ranged from bizarre deepfake of him rapping and wrestling in WWE to outright racist content.

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A deluge of “disrespectful images,” as OpenAI called it In a statementThis is part of the reason the company is pausing its ability to create videos featuring King.

Bernice A. asked. King, the daughter of the late civil rights leader, last week publicly asked people to stop sending her father AI-generated videos. She was Echoing Comedian Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda, called these types of AI videos “horrible.”

OpenAI said in its statement that it “believes that public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their images are used” and that “authorized representatives” of public figures and their estates can request that their images not be included in Sora.

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has relied on others to make these calls. Prior to Sora’s launch, the company reportedly told a number of Hollywood-adjacent talent agencies that they would be able to opt out of having their intellectual property included in Sora. In this case, King’s estate is responsible for choosing how his image is used.

OpenAI’s approach has not complied with decades of copyright law — typically, companies need to license protected content before using it — and OpenAI She reversed her position After a few days. It’s one example of how AI companies and innovators work Conflict over copyrightIncluding through High-profile lawsuits.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)