AI videos of dead celebrities are horrifying many of their families; The Washington Post, October 11, 2025

 

Tatum Hunter

 and 

Drew Harwell

, The Washington Post; AI videos of dead celebrities are horrifying many of their families

[Kip Currier: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's reckless actions in releasing Sora 2.0 without guardrails and accountability mechanisms exemplify Big Tech's ongoing Zuckerberg-ian "Move Fast and Break Things" modus operandi in the AI Age. 

Altman also had to recently walk back his ill-conceived directive that copyright holders would need to opt-out of having their copyrighted works used as AI training data (yet again!), rather than the burden being on OpenAI to secure their opt-ins through licensing.

To learn more about potential further copyright-related questionable conduct by OpenAI, read this 10/10/25 Bloomberg Law article:  OpenAI Risks Billions as Court Weighs Privilege in Copyright Row]

[Excerpt]

"OpenAI said the text-to-video tool would depict real people only with their consent. But it exempted “historical figures” from these limits during its launch last week, allowing anyone to make fake videos resurrecting public figures, including activists, celebrities and political leaders — and leaving some of their relatives horrified.

“It is deeply disrespectful and hurtful to see my father’s image used in such a cavalier and insensitive manner when he dedicated his life to truth,” Shabazz, whose father was assassinated in front of her in 1965 when she was 2, told The Washington Post. She questioned why the developers were not acting “with the same morality, conscience, and care … that they’d want for their own families.”

Sora’s videos have sparked agitation and disgust from many of the depicted celebrities’ loved ones, including actor Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda Williams, who pleaded in an Instagram post recently for people to “stop sending me AI videos of dad.”"

Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move; The Guardian, September 12, 2025

 Ed Pilkington , The Guardian; Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

"In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.

Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”...

Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.

The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”."

‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology; The Guardian, November 24, 2024

  Introduction by Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian; ‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology

"Greek myth is not a stable thing. There is no such thing as a canonical, “original” version of a Greek myth. The stories that remain to us – the material of classical plays and poetry, and of visual culture from pottery to pediments – are already elaborations and accretions. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, stories were adapted and remade to serve the needs of the moment. The Greek tragedians often took the germ of an idea from the Homeric epics, and built an entire plot from it. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for instance, is in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey: both are stories of a warrior’s return from war, but with entirely different outcomes. Euripides’s subversive play Helen proposes that the entire Trojan war was fought not in the cause of a real woman, but of an illusory, fake version sent by the gods, while the “real” Helen of Troy sat out the siege in Egypt.

Seen in this light, as novelist Pat Barker points out below, the modern appetite for working with (and maybe sometimes against) Greek myth is a part of a long continuum, rather than an innovation...

Stephen Fry on Ithaka by CP Cavafy (1911), a poem inspired by The Odyssey

Author of Mythos, Heroes and Troy, a trilogy of books retelling the myths of ancient Greece

The Odyssey is the beginning of human modernity. Suddenly, the greatest qualities a warrior could have were cunning, intelligence and curiosity, but also a sense of home – Odysseus is constantly striving to get back to his wife and son. There was something new in that. This idea of “nostos” – of returning home to the hearth after your wanderings – has been very powerful in the Greek imagination ever since.

Early last century, there was a wonderful Greek poet living in Alexandria named Constantine Cavafy. I found out about him by reading EM Forster, who met Cavafy in Alexandria and recommended him to WH Auden and others. One of Cavafy’s greatest poems is about Ithaca, the island which Odysseus spends 10 years trying to get back to. The poem is about this journey, this yearning to find the place that we think of as home, but Cavafy tells us that it’s not worth anything. You must strive for it, he says, but you’ll find it isn’t the place itself that’s the destination, it’s the striving, it’s what you learn on the way. It’s the gorgeous things you find and the people you meet and the experiences you have. So you must aim for Ithaca and simultaneously know it’s not worth getting to, because it will have nothing to give you. That’s how the poem ends, in Edmund Keeley’s terrific translation: “Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey./ Without her you wouldn’t have set out./ She has nothing left to give you now.”

I think it’s a very brilliant and moving poem, even in translation (I’m sure if you were fluent in modern Greek it would be even more astonishing). It’s an example of what the Greek myths can give us in terms of retellings. All the JRR Tolkien books are nostos stories, stories of returns home – The Hobbit is subtitled There and Back Again. It is the most mythic, primal, elemental story that we have. As told to Killian Fox"