Low self-esteem or lack of care? How a multi-millionaire got caught generating fake people to cheer him on.
Once the darling of Hollywood, Will Smith nowadays can't seem to catch a break: From publicly assaulting others to starring in questionable projects, the US-American actor and rapper has experienced the decline of his public standing for several years straight.
The newest issue getting the internet masses up in arms stems from a video posted on Smith's official social media channels on August 12, 2025, which some have claimed to inappropriately include AI-generated segments.
Will's Willingness
The video in question was meant to promote and celebrate the rapper's current tour through Europe. As implied by the title "My favorite part of tour is seeing you all up close. Thank you for seeing me too", the minute-long post compiles various clips of cheering viewers at past concerts in order to showcase the events' popularity.
However, by pausing and zooming in on many of the signs, faces and extremeties of several "crowd members", multiple nonsensical proto letters as well as body parts blending into each other or concerning amounts of said body parts can be seen. All of these are common mistakes that can occur when generating images and videos via machine-learning software.
Many viewers have concluded that, despite famously fighting against AI in movies like I, Robot, Smith is now using the technology to cover up the fact that the real crowds at his events were either too unenthusiastic or small to make for good promotional material. While it is highly unlikely that the multi-millionaire personally produced the video, much of the criticism has been directly levelled against him due to his social media channels lacking transparent crediting of his content production team.
AI Antipathy
This marks just the latest in a long series of online outcries caused by inappropriate usage of AI-generated material. With many social media platforms being primarily used to consume expressions of creativity, such as animations, sketches, documentaries, photography and the likes, both creators and users have been cautious towards attempts to permiate the space with machine-produced content.
Currently, AI generation tools are often cheaper than human personell (explaining their rising use in promotional material), but the final products are often of a lower quality and/or inaccurate compared to traditional social media uploads. Reliance on these tools is further criticized as being "low-effort" and thus indicative of a general lack of care for the audience, for example resulting in the rejection of scripts written by large language models.
Smith's case has also been controversial due to it being interpretable as the actor disregarding the widespread concerns present in his "hometurf" movie industry. No wonder, with expensive projects being launched to replace physical actors with AI-generated imagery and voice actors fearing that large companies could extract more value of their work (by training AI models on them) than what they have been compensated for.
But what you think? Was this post just the work of some editor taking a shortcut? Or is it indicative of larger issues with AI use? Let us know in the comments below!