#celebrity-likeness

#celebrity-likeness

Madison Lawrence Tabbey was scrolling through X in late October when a post from a Wicked update account caught her attention. Ariana Grande, who stars in the movies as Glinda, had just liked a meme on Instagram about never wanting to see another AI-generated image again. Grande had also purportedly blocked a fan account that had made AI edits of her.

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Sora, OpenAI's new social network devoted wholly to generating and remixing 10-second synthetic videos. At the time of launch, the company said its guardrails prohibited the inclusion of living celebrities, but also declared that it didn't plan to police copyright violations unless owners explicitly opted out of granting permission. Consequently, the clips people shared were rife with familiar faces such as Pikachu and SpongeBob.