Death in the age of AI slop

Because I'm an incredibly slow writer, you undoubtedly already heard about my mom's favorite singer Rod Stewart's bizarre, creepy, hilarious, and depressing all at once "tribute" to Ozzy Osbourne at the North Carolina stop of his latest tour. As captured by Instagram user iamsloanesteel, Stewart performed his ubiquitous 1988 hit "Forever Young" accompanied by an AI-generated reel of the very recently passed Osbourne in Heaven, taking joyful selfies with a collection of other deceased musicians, including Freddie Mercury, Tupac, Kurt Cobain, a young Black woman I can only guess was supposed to be Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, and, puzzlingly, XXXtentacion, whom I don't imagine the average Rod Stewart fan (including my mom) is familiar with.

Given their omission, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, and Sinead O'Connor are presumably burning in Hell. Also notably absent: Randy Rhoads, Osbourne's close friend and guitarist during the Blizzard of Ozz era, and the only musician we can be certain Osbourne would be delighted to run into in the afterlife.

To ask what's wrong with this is to suggest that there's anything right about it. A long list of mistakes, poor choices, and crimes against decency are fighting each other for dominance. Among them is the idea that the famously bumbling Ozzy Osbourne would know how to use a selfie stick, or that Prince, so protective of his image that he wouldn't even let Weird Al Yankovic parody any of his songs, is shoehorned in there, or that everyone is smiling like they're in the video for "Black Hole Sun."

Of course, the biggest problem is that it exists at all, and was deemed a more appropriate choice than Stewart simply opening "Forever Young" with "This one's for Ozzy" or whatever, even though it's still a weird choice, considering Ozzy lived a long life, far longer than anyone would have expected. A watermark on the reel deems it the work of Eternal Stars, a Portuguese TikTok account that posts nothing but AI-generated images of deceased people smiling in Heaven like they could not be happier to be dead.

Because I don't speak Portuguese, I'm unable to tell if this is just something the account owner does for the hell of it, or if they charge a fee for people who find comfort in images of expired loved ones sitting on clouds surrounded by computer-generated butterflies and seagulls. I spent longer than I care to admit scrolling through Eternal Stars' posts, wallowing in their morbidness, particularly those featuring celebrities, including Heath Ledger, Dame Maggie Smith, a rough approximation of Frank Sinatra, and Kobe Bryant holding a very small basketball.

Oh, and uh, Anne Frank.

While the "Ozzy in Heaven" clip met with significant criticism, there was also a not insignificant number of people who praised it as "touching," and claimed not to understand the problem with using dead people's images without their families' consent to create the implication of a relationship (let alone that they believed in a concept of Heaven or an afterlife). Baby Boomers in particular seem to be fine with it, even though they're also the population most likely to be scammed by AI slop, whether it's deep fake phone calls claiming to be a relative in need of bail money, or just images of adorable little third-world children carving intricate sculptures of Jesus Christ with their own eight-fingered hands.

Even America's favorite Baby Boomer Donald Trump has fallen prey to the siren's call of AI. Perhaps because recent real photos depict him as looking exhausted, disheveled, and far less like the golden god his supporters inexplicably perceive him as, Trump has taken to posting AI-generated images of himself, usually as a rock star or some other juvenile "and then everyone will love me" fantasy figure. When he's not doing that, he's posting images reflecting his other masturbatory fantasies, which involve punishing his enemies, like having Barack Obama arrested for some vague "Russian conspiracy" charges.

Beyond every other insidious aspect of AI – the supposed "inevitability" of it, the environmental impact, the copyright infringement, the replacing of actual real people, etc., etc., etc. – its use in creating alternate realities is perhaps the most chilling. I'm not talking just the obvious stuff like deep fake revenge porn, or replacing human relationships with chatbots, or the President of the United States posting clips of a former President being dragged away in handcuffs by the F.B.I. I'm talking about the supposedly "harmless" stuff, like ads for Facetune, which encourages its users to eliminate from photographs all signs that they're human beings who occasionally have bad skin and undereye circles. "Look like you drink green juice," one ad notes, because that's quicker and easier than just drinking green juice and waiting to see what happens.

It's not enough to simply Photoshop a dead relative into a family photo anymore. Now we can have simulations of them dancing at weddings that they weren't really alive to attend, or play with grandchildren born decades after they died. On a surface level, there's no harm in it (other than it's deeply unsettling, like when Pennywise shows up in old film footage of Derry in IT). But at what point does it become just another way for us to avoid the reality of death, and the messiness of grief?

It's one thing to listen to the last voicemail we received from a loved one, as a reminder of what they sounded like. It's something else entirely to use a service that creates an AI simulation of our loved one's voice so that we can continue having conversations with them, and not ever have to accept that they're gone. It's only a matter of time before someone combines photo aging with AI so that people who've lost children can create alternate realities where their children grew up, got married, and became doctors, or even President. "What's the harm in that?" you may ask. Well, nothing, I suppose, until you become so absorbed in it that you become detached from the real world, which seems to be the overarching goal of AI's biggest champions.

The more social media has allowed us to connect with other people, the more we sink into an irreality, guided by insidious suggestions that our actual realities are unsatisfying, perhaps even embarrassing. At some point, we all began existing in a global version of Second Life, where no one knows what we really look like, we put ourselves at events we were never at, we fall in love with computer programs instead of living, breathing people, and no one ever dies.