(Credit: OpenAI Sora)
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Don’t expect to see as many dead celebrities in Sora. OpenAI tells PCMag it will remove "public figures who are recently deceased" from the AI video app if their families or estates request it.
This comes amid backlash over Sora’s capacity to generate realistic videos of nearly anyone, including deceased celebrities, and place them in a wide range of user-imagined scenarios.
Most notably, the daughters of actor Robin Williams and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. condemned the flood of AI-generated videos featuring their fathers’ likenesses. "It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want," Zelda Williams wrote in an Instagram Story.
Sora has also been full of other celebrities, including rap artist Tupac Shakur, painter Bob Ross, and physicist Stephen Hawking.
OpenAI initially allowed AI-generated videos featuring deceased celebrities — a prohibition that already exists for living famous figures. But on Wednesday, the company pivoted and said: “While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, we believe that public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used.
“For public figures who are recently deceased, authorized representatives or owners of their estate can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos,” the company adds.
However, Axios reports that OpenAI hasn’t clarified what counts as recently deceased. Robin Williams died in 2014; Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
In the meantime, the policy appears to be already in effect for at least a few celebrities. For example, Sora will no longer generate videos featuring music legend Michael Jackson, flagging it as a potential content policy violation. Over the weekend, the company also shifted gears on allowing Sora to create AI-generated videos featuring characters from famous franchises.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pledged to "give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls." As a result, it looks like you can no longer create videos featuring characters such as Nintendo's Mario or Pikachu. An OpenAI website is also accepting copyright Sora and ChatGPT copyright complaints.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.