Season 2 of Ted dropped on Peacock this week, and fans seem to be enjoying the new episodes, with one exception. The production used AI to turn Seth MacFarlane into former President Bill Clinton, and it has sparked some controversy.
“I’ve been doing my Bill Clinton impression since the early days of Family Guy,” MacFarlane told the Associated Press. “It’s an interesting example of how AI can be used as a tool and not necessarily trample on the art that the rest of the industry is doing."
"We tried prosthetics, we tried traditional CGI, and everything just looked terrifying," he added. "So we just said, ‘To hell with it, let’s try AI.’ It worked. It was the only way to look like Bill Clinton.”
The internet reacts to AI Bill Clinton in Ted
People don't like the use of AI in Ted for several reasons. First of all, people have successfully impersonated Clinton in shows and movies for over 30 years without AI, so some folks are having trouble believing it was the "only way."
"THEN JUST GET AN ACTOR THAT LOOKS LIKE HIM," @SlimSummers97 wrote on Twitter. "Looks awful. Would have been cheaper just to hire an impersonator," @drek77107 added.
"This is why I respected Smiling Friends for doing rotoscoping that was so ugly and terrible-looking that it became not only part of the joke, but the joke itself," @lfitzmaurice posted.
Meanwhile, others are concerned about the legal implications and worry it could open the door for productions to use people's likenesses without their consent.
"Feels like there are some massive legal questions and implications around doing this in a real production? What’s the substantive difference between doing this to Bill Clinton than, say, Tom Cruise?" @jbillinson wondered.
"I don’t care for Bill Clinton in the slightest, but I have serious concerns about this being allowed without explicit consent. Rules around parody should allow for impressions and lookalike actors/makeup, but it feels like it’s crossing a line to allow a perfect AI replica of that person," u/Flabby-Nonsense wrote on Reddit.
It might also be bad for comedy in general. "It’s also less funny," @thisisharding tweeted. "There’s a weird dissonance when it’s the actual face but not the actual voice. Would have been better off with Seth MacFarlane in bad makeup."
"Seth really paid a computer millions to do what his acting couldn't... iconic," @jayyecarpy joked.
However, some people don't mind it. "Wait, I gotta watch the Ted series cuz I’m crying," @SavinTheBees commented on the clip.
"This is actually the most reasonable AI take I've seen from Hollywood. 'We tried everything else, and it looked terrible, so we used the tool that worked' is a wildly sane approach compared to the usual discourse of either 'AI will replace all artists' or 'AI should never touch creative work,'" @Spiralquinn argued.
"Its AI Deepfake technology. It's not the same generative AI people hate. I'm genuinely frustrated by people always assuming the worst when they read 'AI' instead of finding out more. They hear the buzzword and immediately start hating with no other context. This was AI being used as a tool, not for replacing people," u/JamStan1978 said on Reddit.
"Deepfaking the appearance of someone who's not actually appearing in your TV show is as problematic as Gen AI if not worse," u/Dooms_Herald argued back.
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