Over the past few years, actor, rapper, and slapper Will Smith has been the subject of a grotesque meme in AI is used to show him gobbling down on nightmarish squelching spaghetti.

It now seems that the 56-year-old "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" star's team has used the tech to soup up concert footage from his would-be comeback tour — and it strongly appears that the purpose was to make an underwhelming crowd look like they're still filled with love for Smith's much-lampooned career trajectory.

Posted recently on YouTube and Instagram, the minute-long video from Smith's "Based on a True Story" tour shows the "Wild Wild West" actor performing onstage for what in the video looks at first glance like a packed crowd of adoring fans, many of whom are experiencing emotional outbursts and holding signs about how impactful he's been in their lives.

The problem, as online observers quickly pointed out, is that many segments of the video are clearly either AI-generated entirely, or at least severely altered using the tech.

Don't believe us? Just look at this gentleman who appears partway through, his passion for Will Smith expressed through an inverted rictus never before seen on a living human face as he holds aloft a sign saying that Smith's mostly forgotten 2024 single "You Can Make It" helped him "survive cancer." For extra nightmare fuel, check out some of those visages in the background — and oh yeah, why is another person's hand morphing into the man's grasp on his sign?

Not enough evidence for you? Just take a look — no, really look — at this ghoulish crowd scene, where tormented-looking faces melt together under a banner, held aloft by no one in particular, that reads "From West Philly to West Swiggy, we [heart] you Will" in AI-garbled lettering with strange markings beside it.

Scrambling the situation further, the video seems to be an uncanny mixture of real footage of Smith and distant crowd scenes, mixed with closeups of rapturous fans that are either completely fake or edited into unintentionally hilarious caricature. (It's also worth noting that the crowd in the video is almost entirely white, for some reason.)

On social, reactions were brutal.

"Just a mess of blurry half-faces, hands with 7 fingers, phones that have been crossed with old fashioned cameras, foreheads disappearing into nowhere etc," one viewer wrote. "There's not a trace of human in that shot."

Interestingly, the video isn't labeled on either YouTube or Instagram as containing AI-generated content, which YouTube has tacitly required for nearly 18 months and Meta, the owner of Instagram, has required for nearly as long.

And as a reality check, compare the Beatlemania-esque euphoria of the concertgoers in the video with real footage from the tour, which shows an modestly-sized crowd swaying lightly while holding up smartphones to record the spectacle of an AARP-aged Smith bopping around onstage through numerous costume changes. (Also tellingly, we were unable to locate a video of the tour on YouTube featuring more than 500 views.)

A user who claimed to have attended the "I, Robot" actor's concert in Frankfurt, Germany earlier this summer attested that their crowd experience differed majorly from what was shown in Smith's video.

"I was at his show in Frankfurt, and it was really sad. The hall was only a little more than half full, and the expensive seats were about 20 percent sold out," they wrote. "His social media posts after the concert made it look like the venue was packed. The show was really bad; the best crowd reaction was when they played videos of the Carlton dance and his dancers breakdancing to 90s hip-hop songs (not his)."

Add it all up, it seems pretty straightforward what happened: the aging rapper or his team were unhappy with the underwhelming concert footage they captured in reality, so they decided to "enhance" it using AI tech — and ended up creating an accidental parody in which fans writhe in ecstasy to a guy who's just not bringing in rabid throngs anymore. Or heck, maybe he'll come out and say he was in on the joke.

Smith's team doesn't seem to have provided a response to any publication yet, but we've contacted his representation with questions. We'll update if we hear back.

More on concert AI: Rod Stewart Revives Selfie Stick-Wielding Ozzy Osbourne In Disgusting AI Slop Video


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