OpenAI Pauses Sora AI Videos of Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘Inappropriate’ Deepfakes Flood the App

OpenAI will no longer allow its users to create AI deepfakes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on its Sora AI social media app. That decision highlights the intense conflict between AI companies and rights holders like celebrities’ estates, movie studios and talent agencies — and how generative AI tech continues to erode reality for all of us.

Sora, a new sister app to ChatGPT, lets users create and share AI-generated videos. It launched to much fanfare three weeks ago, with AI enthusiasts searching for invite codes. But Sora is unique among AI video generators and social media apps; it lets you use other people’s recorded likenesses to place them in nearly any AI video. It has been, at best, weird and funny — and at worst, a never-ending scroll of deepfakes that are nearly indistinguishable from reality.

OpenAI does have guardrails in place to prevent the creation of videos of well-known people: It rejected my prompt asking for a video of Taylor Swift on stage, for example. But these guardrails aren’t perfect, as we’ve seen this week with a growing trend of people creating videos featuring King. They ranged from weird deepfakes of him rapping and wrestling in the WWE to overtly racist content.

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The flood of “disrespectful depictions,” as OpenAI called them in a statement, is part of why the company paused the ability to create videos featuring King.

Bernice A. King, daughter of the late civil rights leader, last week publicly asked for people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father. She was echoing comedian Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda, who called these sorts of AI videos “gross.”

In its statement, OpenAI said it “believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used” and that “authorized representatives” of public figures and their estates can request that their likeness not be included in Sora.

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has leaned on others to make those calls. Before Sora’s launch, the company reportedly told a number of Hollywood-adjacent talent agencies that they would be able to opt out of having their intellectual property included in Sora. In this case, King’s estate is the entity responsible for choosing how his likeness is used. 

OpenAI’s approach didn’t square with decades of copyright law — usually, companies need to license protected content before using it — and OpenAI reversed its stance a few days later. It’s one example of how AI companies and creators are clashing over copyright, including through high-profile lawsuits.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)