I’ve tried my best to pay as little attention as possible to Kanye West’s various antics over the last few years, tuning in occasionally to worry about his wife Bianca Censori and hope that the four children he shares with ex-wife Kim Kardashian are as unaffected as is reasonably possible by their father’s declining mental health and ensuing downslide into racist and anti-Semitic hate speech. As a Jew noting the fascism currently being normalized in U.S. politics, though, I couldn’t avoid noticing—and being appalled by—West’s latest meltdown, which involved openly calling himself a Nazi and selling a $30 T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika on the Yeezy site.
Regardless of West’s clear intent to provoke commentary or the current state of his mental health, this type of virulent anti-Semitism requires clear and immediate condemnation in order to maintain the safety of Jews everywhere. Unfortunately, though, a recently viral video of Jewish celebrities launching just that sort of condemnation against West has been revealed to be unauthorized AI. Scarlett Johansson—one of many famous faces featured in the video alongside Drake, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Black, Mila Kunis, and Lenny Kravitz—recently denounced what she has called “the misuse of A.I., no matter what its messaging.” (Johansson has previously taken a stand against aggressive generative AI that has traded on her voice and likeness without her consent.)
While this particular video might seem harmless or even beneficial in its effort to repudiate West’s harmful comments, there’s something eminently disconnected and, well, just plain creepy about AI being used to put words in people’s mouths when they’re more than capable of speaking for themselves. Even if the makers of the video did have its various celebrities’ consent, do we really want to farm the weighty and morally necessary task of defending marginalized groups and promoting social justice out to machines that train on human beings’ creativity, passion, and innovation? Can we ever expect AI to do the necessary social work of speaking truth to power when it’s often being engineered by mostly white, cis, male, rich tech leaders whose ranks are rife with implicit bias?
Unfortunately, the Kanye West video is just one example of the theory that we’re all getting a little too comfortable letting AI guide the way we see the world and its various injustices. Women are particularly vulnerable to the steadily growing threat of sexually explicit deepfake culture, and last year, a synthetic image of Gaza became the most viral ever AI-generated photo and was shared millions of times on Instagram and other platforms despite the fact that it wasn’t actually real. While the impulse to bear witness to the devastation in Gaza is a commendable one, what does it mean that so many of us would rather look to an AI-painted portrait of war-torn Gaza than engage with the actual human suffering taking place on the ground?
