In a recent meeting at work, conversation turned to the ethics of AI. It’s a discussion I dread, partly because every time I’ve had it recently, it feels so unwieldy. Once it starts, there’s no putting a lid on it. “ChatGPT has made my life easier,” someone will say. “It’s a slippery slope,” the other will reply. “We just need to learn to use it responsibly,” the first person might respond. “Gen Z’s use of these tools is out of control, they’re all writing their essays with them,” the other might clap back.
This week, I felt a similar feeling of apprehension when I saw a version of this conversation playing out in response to a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne. One of Osbourne’s peers, rock star Rod Stewart, was facing a spate of online criticism for screening a bizarre AI-generated video of the late Black Sabbath frontman.
In the video, which Stewart screened at a concert in Alpharetta, Georgia, Osbourne can be seen holding a selfie stick, posing and laughing with other deceased celebrities in that airbrushed, uncanny slow-mo effect that is typical of AI content. Padded by a backdrop of blue sky and clouds, the implication was that Osbourne, Tupac, Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury and others were now taking selfies in heaven. “This is the craziest, most disrespectful s*** I ever saw in my LIFE!!!” wrote one person who shared the video.
Another compared it to “making a video of your dead grandma breakdancing in heaven with Princess Diana and putting it on a giant screen as part of my tour that people paid money to see”, adding: “And I’m gonna do it without your knowledge or permission.”
It is not hard to see why these conversations about AI are so divisive, and can feel almost irreconcilable. All the constituent parts that make a winding and inconclusive debate are there: ethical conundrums, economic considerations, perceived generational divides, and rapid social change that impacts multiple parts of daily life, including the delicate extremes of human experience like birth and death.
Crucially, there are also no straightforward answers: AI isn’t really “good” or “bad” – rather, the way we use it requires consideration, responsibility and discretion. There are a lot of grey areas, and we have to use our own judgement to work out where to draw the line. And, as is always the case with new scientific and technological developments, just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
Many feel that good judgement was absent from Stewart’s AI montage, and that he made the wrong call. I’m inclined to agree, but mostly because I found the video aesthetically distasteful. It was so poorly executed that literally any of us could have made it at home – it looked cheap, it was repetitive, and it didn’t have any particular prestige factor. Still, you couldn’t help but think that the 80-year-old felt that he was showing off a shiny new toy. I could hear my Gen Z colleague’s contribution to our meeting echoing in my ears: “Boomers love AI.”
Not only is the video tacky, it’s superfluous. Whatever happened to the good old, black and white “in memoriam” photo? Do we really need to see an AI-generated star kicking it back in heaven? I had a similar feeling when I saw posthumous CGI recreations of Peter Cushing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Harold Ramis in the aptly named Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Surely there was another way to pay homage to their previous performances, without these gimmicky, Frankenstein-like resurrections?
There are also questions about the ethics of not letting the deceased, well, rest in peace. It’s more of an emotional instinct than a material reality, but when I see these kinds of tributes, I often notice an icky feeling that some of these people are still being put to work. This dredges up other questions about star exploitation for profit, even in death.
You can make a computer-generated star behave however you like, which might be a dream for industry execs, but a nightmare for the stars themselves. Actor Susan Sarandon is one of many who have spoken out against this practice, warning that AI could make her “say and do things I have no choice about”. While surviving family members might be able to weigh in, there’s no way to really say whether the person in question would have consented to being puppeted like this at a concert. Ozzy Osbourne, in particular, was supposed to be the Prince of Darkness – something tells me he wouldn’t have chosen to be memorialised as beaming in the clouds, brandishing a selfie stick. Singers like Whitney Houston and Aaliyah, who are both included in the video, also had extremely traumatic and exploitative experiences in the industry, which arguably contributed to their premature deaths. Shouldn’t they be allowed to rest?
Meanwhile, it could be argued that including Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, is essentially giving him a renewed platform. This would undoubtedly bring up extremely complicated feelings for those who have accused him of sexual abuse, and face the ongoing trauma of seeing Jackson’s image resurrected and celebrated through posthumous cash cows such as MJ the Musical.
You can’t help but think that Stewart, and whichever staff were involved in the video, didn’t turn over any of these emotional or ethical questions when they whipped it up (which could have taken a couple of minutes, by the way).
Which leads me to my stance on the dreaded AI debate: since it seems impossible to thwart the proliferation of these tools, we might as well get to work on educating ourselves on them. By this, I mean engaging with the social, economic and moral considerations that come with AI use, and remembering to use it with restraint. While you might assume that these kinds of interventions should be aimed at younger generations, I think Stewart’s recent hiccup signals that everyone needs to be involved in discussions, no matter how complex they are, about one of the most important issues of our times.
