Social media videos tend to go viral when they’re centered on a new dance craze or when a celebrity does something off the cuff. In recent days, however, some of the most popular online videos have one common thread: long-gone celebrities and homes.
AI-generated videos are making the rounds, for example, of British singer Amy Winehouse and Queen Elizabeth II making ceviche in a kitchen alongside rapper Tupac Shakur. Another has Shakur visiting Mr. Rogers in his television set home in Pittsburgh (prompting one TikTok user to comment “Thug Life meets Hug Life.")
The videos are circulating on TikTok and other platforms for two reasons. They give a hilarious — albeit false — view of some of the world's most historical figures. Second, they were created using an updated version of Sora, a video-generating app from OpenAI.
Social media users have spent the past few days coming up with creative and goofy ways to test out Sora 2’s capabilities. Sora 2, released on Oct. 1, allowed users to place celebrities and other public figures in fictional settings — prompting concerns about copyright infringement cases across the web. The videos — which can be up to 10 seconds long for the free version — have prompted officials at OpenAI to implement new guardrails on what users can produce, such as banning the use of copyrighted characters and blocking depictions of living public figures.
Users have adjusted to those parameters, by the way. That's why you now see videos of Elvis Presley giving a selfie-style outdoor tour of his Graceland home in Memphis, Tennessee, and Michael Jackson fixing a leaky kitchen sink — leading another TikTok user to comment: “[Billie] Jean is not my plumber.”
Elvis, Shakur and the others are indeed long gone, but they’re appearing again in the context of housework because perhaps there’s nothing more familiar or more human than taking care of your home.