It’s not even a year since Ozzy Osbourne left us and already there are plans to turn him into an AI-powered avatar.
That’s what Sharon Osbourne and son Jack promised at the Licensing Expo last week. They have entered into a partnership with a tech company called HYPERREAL (very deliberately all in caps and one word, it seems) to create, in Jack’s words: "the digital DNA of Ozzy Osbourne, voice, image and movement.”
“He will exist digitally as himself for as long as we have computers,” he said. “Technology has come such a long way to where it's almost drag and drop. You could shoot a template for a commercial ... literally prompt what you want Digital Ozzy to do in that commercial and you just drop it in. It's that simple now."
"You can ask Ozzy anything, and he will answer you in his own voice – and the answers will be what Ozzy would have said," added Sharon. "We're going to take it all around the world. People can talk to him and he will talk back."
If you find this idea all a bit disrespectful and in dubious taste (not to mention morality), then you’re not alone. Many fans voiced those very concerns in a Youtube livestream over the weekend. Osbourne Junior insisted, though, that “it’s gonna be so tasteful what we’re doing. It’s not gonna be fucking lame.”
“It’s really complex what we’re doing. This isn’t just like hooking up an image of my dad to ChatGPT. This is some high-level technology that we’re gonna be working with, and it’s gonna feel very real, and it’s kind of wild how it will be utilised.”
But is it what he would have wanted? “It’s really cool and it’s something that I think my dad would be into,” Osbourne explained. “We actually talked about it before he passed, about doing something like this… I know he would be into this.”
An AI Ozzy is not the only pop avatar that’s in the works. Kiss are working on their own avatar show – though of course several of their members are still alive to work with the motion-capture technology that was central to making Abba Voyage the huge success it’s been. But promises of an AI Elvis in last year’s Elvis Evolution show turned out to be a damp squib and the idea of a touring Amy Winehouse hologram was quietly put to bed after an initial fanfare in 2018.
"The things that you can do with it (the technology) are just endless," Sharon mused at the Licensing Expo last week. But does that mean you should do them?
