Jack Osbourne says he shoulders the blame for the backlash to controversial plans to produce an AI version of his late father Ozzy.
When the digital Ozzy was announced, Jack said his father “would be into” it. He and his mother Sharon later stressed that it was not the ghoulish cash grab that some fans had branded it, saying instead that it was about ensuring the Black Sabbath icon would be remembered.
Now in a new interview for Great Company With Jamie Laing, Jack insists the digital version of his dad won’t be used for anything tacky like selling cell phones and admits his naivety was to blame for the backlash.
Jack, 40, says: “The backlash, it was my own fault. We’d just kind of figured this thing out, that we were gonna do it, and I guess I wasn’t properly armed with the way to properly explain what it was.
“And I think people thought that next thing it’s gonna be Ozzy Osbourne selling cell phones. No.”
He adds that they family wanted get out in front of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence landscape by making sure they retained the rights to Ozzy’s digital IP (intellectual property).
“A lot of people are doing this now,” he says. “Creating the AI model and creating the digital fingerprint of whoever – whether it’s my father or Bob Marley’s people are doing it, and Michael Jackson’s team are doing it.
“By kind of creating this digital fingerprint, you ultimately will own the digital IP and image of that person. And so as to what it can be used for now, yeah, there’s a handful of things.
“But down the road, it’s where things are going. It’s no different than saying, ‘I wanna own my images of my father. I wanna own his intellectual property,’
“It’s just another avenue. And the fact that AI is what it is, it’s not going anywhere, it’s not changing. It was our choice to go, ‘Hey, we should be out in front of this, and we should not be on the back foot with having this kind of new pillar of entertainment properly locked down.’”
The digital Ozzy plan sees the family teaming up with Hyperreal for the project they are calling The Enduring Legacy of a Rock Icon and His Family: Ozzy Osbourne and The Osbournes.
(LouderSound)
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