said in a BlueSky post<\/a>.<\/p>\nPeople who have died more recently have also been spotted. The app is littered with videos of Stephen Hawking receiving a \u201c#powerslap\u201d that knocks his wheelchair over. Kobe Bryant dunks on an old woman while shouting about objects up his rectum. Amy Winehouse can be found stumbling around the streets of Manhattan or crying into the camera as mascara runs down her face.<\/p>\n
Deaths from the past two years \u2013 Ozzy Osbourne, Matthew Perry, Liam Payne \u2013 are absent, indicating a cutoff that falls somewhere between.<\/p>\n
Whenever they died, this \u201cpuppeteering\u201d of the dead risks redrawing the lines of history, says Henry Ajder, a generative AI expert. \u201cPeople fear that a world saturated with this kind of content is going to lead to a distortion of these people and how they\u2019re remembered,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Sora\u2019s algorithm rewards shock value. One video high on my feed shows King making monkey sounds during his I Have a Dream speech. Others depict Bryant re-enacting the helicopter crash that killed him and his daughter.<\/p>\n
[There\u2019s] going to be legal uncertainty until the supreme court takes up a case \u2013 and that\u2019s another two to four yearsAshkhen Kazaryan<\/p>\n
While actors or cartoons may also portray people posthumously, there are stronger legal guardrails. A movie studio is liable for its content; OpenAI is not necessarily liable for what appears on Sora. Depicting someone for commercial use also requires an estate\u2019s consent in some states.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe couldn\u2019t just intimately resurrect Christopher Lee to star in a new horror film, so why can OpenAI resurrect him to star in thousands of shorts?\u201d asks James Grimmelmann, an internet law expert at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s decision to hand the personas of the departed to the commons raises uncomfortable questions about how the dead should live on in the generative AI era.<\/p>\n
The legal question<\/p>\n
Consigning the ghosts of celebrities to for ever haunt Sora might feel wrong, but is it legal? That depends who you ask.<\/p>\n
A major question remains unresolved in internet law: are AI companies covered bysection 230, and therefore not liable for the third-party content on their platforms? If OpenAI is protected under section 230, it cannot be sued for what users make on Sora.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut unless there\u2019s federal legislation on the issue, it\u2019s going to be legal uncertainty until the supreme court takes up a case \u2013 and that\u2019s another two to four years,\u201d says Ashkhen Kazaryan, an expert in first amendment and technology policy.<\/p>\n
Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s CEO, speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 in San Francisco, California, on 2 June. He is one of the living figures who has allowed Sora to use his likeness. Photograph: Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
In the meantime, OpenAI must avoid lawsuits. That means requiring the living to give consent. US libel law protects living people from any \u201ccommunication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person\u2019s reputation\u201d. On top of this, most states have right of publicity laws that prevent someone\u2019s voice, persona or likeness being used without consent for \u201ccommercial\u201d or \u201cmisleading\u201d purposes.<\/p>\n
Permitting the dead \u201cis their way of dipping their toe in the water\u201d, says Kazaryan.<\/p>\n
The deceased are not protected from libel, but three states \u2013 New York, California and Tennessee \u2013 grant a postmortem right of publicity (the commercial right to your likeness). Navigating these laws in the context of AI remains a \u201cgrey area\u201d without legal precedent, says Grimmelmann.<\/p>\n
People are treating it like entertainment, seeing what crazy stuff they can come up with or how many likes they can gatherBo Bergstedt<\/p>\n
To sue successfully, estates would have to show OpenAI is liable \u2013 for example, by arguing it encourages users to depict the dead.<\/p>\n
Grimmelmann notes that Sora\u2019s homepage is full of such videos, in effect promoting this content. And if Sora was trained on large volumes of footage of historical figures, plaintiffs might argue that the app is designed to reproduce it.<\/p>\n
OpenAI could, however, defend itself by claiming Sora is purely for entertainment. Each video carries a watermark, preventing it from misleading people or being classed as commercial.<\/p>\n
Bo Bergstedt, a generative AI researcher, says most users are exploring, not monetising.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are treating it like entertainment, seeing what crazy stuff they can come up with or how many likes they can gather,\u201d he says. Upsetting as this may be for families, it could still comply with publicity laws.<\/p>\n
But if a Sora user builds an audience by generating popular clips of historical figures and starts monetising that following, they could find themselves in legal trouble. Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the security, trust and safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, notes that \u201ceconomic AI slop\u201d includes earning money indirectly through monetised platforms. Sora\u2019s emerging \u201cAI influencers\u201d could therefore face lawsuits from estates if they profit from the dead.<\/p>\n
A \u2018Whac-A-Mole\u2019 approach<\/p>\n
In response to the backlash, OpenAI announced last week that it would begin allowing representatives of \u201crecently deceased\u201d public figures to request that their likeness be blocked from Sora videos.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, we believe that public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used,\u201d an OpenAI spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
The company has not yet defined \u201crecently\u201d, or explained how requests will be handled. OpenAI did not immediately respond to the Guardian\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
It has also backtracked on its copyright-free-for-all approach, after subversive content such as \u201cNazi Spongebob\u201d spread across the platform and the Motion Picture Association accused OpenAI of infringement. A week after launch, it switched to an opt-in model for rights holders.<\/p>\n
Grimmelmann expects a similar pivot over depictions of the dead. \u201cInsisting people must opt out if they don\u2019t like this may not be tenable,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s ghoulish, and if I have that instinct, others will too \u2013 including judges.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bergstedt calls this a \u201cWhac-A-Mole\u201d approach to guardrails that will probably continue until federal courts define AI liability.<\/p>\n
In Ajder\u2019s view, the Sora dispute foreshadows a larger question each of us will eventually face: who gets to control our likeness in the synthetic age?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a worrying situation if people simply accept that they\u2019re going to be used and abused in hyperrealistic AI-generated content.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last night I was flicking through a dating app. One guy stood out: \u201cHenry VIII, 34, King of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-220401","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}