Will Smith Used AI to Animate Concert Photos With Nightmarish Results
![A large crowd at a concert holds a handmade sign reading, “FROM WEST PHILLY TO WEST SWIDAY WE [heart] YOU WILLY!” People around the sign are cheering and clapping.](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2025/08/Will-Smith-AI-Crowd-800x420.jpg)
Will Smith is currently playing in the U.K. as part of his ‘Based on a True Story’ tour. The actor, rapper, and film producer has been sharing snippets of his live performances.
However, one recent video showing a series of clips from recent shows had many accusing Smith of AI-generating crowds — and it does seem like something is off.
Fans noticed that many members of the crowd appeared uncanny; waxy skin and morphed features are a telltale sign that AI technology has been used, but what exactly has happened?
Multiple outlets have contacted Smith’s representatives, but so far Smith has not responded to the allegations. Comments have filled his social media pages, lambasting the performer for using the AI tech.
What’s Really Going On?
It seems unlikely that Smith and his team would AI-generate fake crowds. After all, all of Smith’s legs in the U.K. are sold out. One show held at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre was played in front of more than 6,000 people.
Photographer Joshua Scott speculates that Smith’s team “took photos from the event and used AI to animate it for the video.”
That is a good hypothesis. Or similarly, the team took video footage from the event and, for whatever reason, decided to upscale it with AI. Although the photo theory seems more plausible.
Andy Baio of Waxy points to a photo of the same crowd that Smith posted a few weeks earlier, which looks far more normal. The photo was taken at the Paléo Festival Nyon in Switzerland and it seems like Smith’s team ran the photo through an image-to-video AI model, hence why many of the faces look unnatural.
Nevertheless, the ethics of taking a photo and turning it into an AI video blurs the lines between what is real and what is not. Is an AI video based on a real photo still a legitimate documentation of the event?
The video looks similar to the nightmarish faces that were seen on Netflix after the streamer upscaled old TV shows with AI technology. Not only does it distort faces, but it also garbles text.
Smith has had a bad last decade. Once arguably Hollywood’s biggest star, a series of scandals has damaged his reputation — perhaps none more notorious than the infamous slap attack on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards.
