That ad of Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Sandler and Drake donning a T-shirt with a ‘middle finger to Kanye’ (referring to Kanye West) print on the front? It’s not real. Instead, it’s the latest in a series of bizarre AI deepfake videos to go viral on social media.
The ad also features deepfakes of a slew of celebs — many of whom of Jewish descent — including Jerry Seinfeld, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Jake Gyllehnaal, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lenny Kravitz, David Schwimmer, Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, Adam Levine and OpenAI’s Sam Altman himself, among others. All of them are wearing the same T-shirt, which also has a Star of David printed at the center of the middle finger.
The fake ad, which — at the time of writing — has amassed over 16,000 likes on and more than 875,000 views on X, closes with the deep-sounding, but ultimately banal and superficial, slogan “Enough is Enough.”
To make matters even more uncanny and surreal, a rendition of the popular Jewish folk song Hava Nagila plays in the background.
The video comes amidst news of Shopify shutting down West’s Yeezy site after the rapper put up a swastika t-shirt, titled “HH-01” — a code for “Heil Hitler,” according to the ADL. Prior to launching the antisemitic garment, West had been wreaking havoc on social media for nearly a week.
The Rise Of AI Deepfakes
This isn’t the first time deepfakes have made waves on social media.
Although not all such uses of deepfakes have been for nefarious reasons — French President Emmanuel Macron posted an AI video of himself to promote AI Action Summit earlier this week — a big chunk of them have been of exploitative nature.
Last year, Johansson, who is featured in the ‘F Kanye’ ad, was embroiled in another deepfake controversy.
OpenAI released a voice for ChatGPT dubbed “Sky” which bore an eerie similarity to that of Johansson. The actress revealed OpenAI had broached the idea of using her voice for the service, but she ultimately declined. She later found herself “shocked, angered and in disbelief” to see her likeness used without her consent.
Altman eventually issued an apology to Johansson and pulled the voice from ChatGPT.
In another instance, AI-generated images depicting Taylor Swift in a sexually explicit manner proliferated across social media and 4chan. As a direct response, a bill was later introduced that would ban the spread of nonconsensual, sexualized images generated by AI.
Indeed, William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency have all recently contracted the services of a company specializing in removing AI-generated images and videos of celebs, according to Rolling Stone.
