Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 26th August 2025

Will Smith’s concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines. Great piece from Andy Baio demonstrating quite how convoluted the usage ethics and backlash against generative AI has become.

Will Smith has been accused of using AI to misleadingly inflate the audience sizes of his recent tour. It looks like the audiences were real, but the combined usage of static-image-to-video models by his team with YouTube's ugly new compression experiments gave the resulting footage an uncanny valley effect that lead to widespread doubts over the veracity of the content.

# 3:50 am / andy-baio, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics