Ozzy Osbourne’s AI ghost won’t be “fucking lame,” son assures

Everyone grieves differently. Some people hold memorials, collect photos, get honorary tattoos, or write apostrophic letters to the deceased. Ozzy Osbourne’s family, for their part, is using AI to make a hologram of him for commercial use. After the Black Sabbath frontman died last summer, his loved ones wasted little time partnering with tech companies Hyperreal and Proto Hologram to create an avatar of the singer that could be used in commercials and “on interactive touchscreens” across the U.S. and U.K. 

At an expo last week, Osbourne’s son Jack told an audience that it was “scary” how accurate his dad’s hologram was. “He will exist digitally as himself for as long as we have computers. Technology has come such a long way to where it’s almost drag and drop,” he said. “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.” Osbourne’s wife Sharon added, “Elvis died 50 years ago and everybody knows Elvis. I just want that for Ozzy.” She also noted that Osbourne’s avatar would be able to answer questions from fans, and that the answers “will be what Ozzy would have said.” Right, right. 

Black Sabbath fans correctly derided the decision, calling it distasteful and speculating that Osbourne himself would not have approved a mass-market rollout of his posthumous likeness. In a riposte to growing dissent, Jack hosted a YouTube livestream on Saturday and doubled down on turning his father’s corpse into an AI-generated shell. “Here’s the thing—it’s gonna be so tasteful what we’re doing,” he told viewers. “It’s not gonna be fucking lame.” In case anyone didn’t buy this ironclad argument at face value, he continued: “And 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 utilized. It’s really cool, and it’s something that I think my dad would be into. We actually talked about it before he passed, about doing something like this. So, yeah. I know he would be into this.”

Hyperreal, the company behind Osbourne’s robot resurrection, has previously created avatars of the Notorious B.I.G., Lionel Messi, and Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee, whom they charged fans $15 to “talk to” at Comic Con last year. It’s difficult to picture the fabled, bat-eating Prince of Darkness—who once called a TV remote “fucking space-age shit”—being amenable to having a digitized fate similar to Lee’s, much less spending his postmortal time as a mascot in an AI-generated detergent commercial on Hulu. 

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