Are deepfakes of dead people rewriting the past?

While Sora has some guardrails around the likenesses of living people, protections around the likenesses of those who have died appear to be an afterthought.

OpenAI’s new text-to-video app, Sora, was supposed to be a social AI playground, allowing users to create imaginative AI videos of themselves, friends and celebrities while building off of others’ ideas.

The social structure of the app, which allows users to adjust the availability of their likeness in others’ videos, seemed to address the most pressing questions of consent around AI-generated video when it was launched last week.

But as Sora sits atop the iOS App Store with over 1 million downloads, experts worry about its potential to deluge the internet with historical misinformation and deepfakes of deceased historical figures who cannot consent to or opt out of Sora’s AI models.

In less than a minute, the app can generate short videos of deceased celebrities in situations they were never in: Aretha Franklin making soy candles, Carrie Fisher trying to balance on a slackline, Nat King Cole ice skating in Havana and Marilyn Monroe teaching Vietnamese to schoolchildren, for instance.

That’s a nightmare for people like Adam Streisand, an attorney who has represented several celebrity estates, including Monroe’s at one point.