AI Accidentally Added Jeff Beck into the Rolling Stones'…

While producing the music video for their single "In the Stars" from the album Foreign Tongues, the Rolling Stones encountered an unexpected error involving deepfake technology. The band utilized AI to de-age themselves to appear as their younger selves, mistakenly resulting in the inclusion of the late guitarist Jeff Beck within the footage.

What happened

The production team employed deepfake technology to recreate the band members' appearances, using the 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil as a visual reference for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Because Ronnie Wood did not join the Rolling Stones until 1975, the AI was tasked with sourcing alternative footage of him from his earlier career. This included his time playing in the Jeff Beck Group during the late 1960s.

The AI model struggled to distinguish between the band members and their historical associates when processing this training data. During a review session, Mick Jagger noticed that at the 3:18 mark of the video, the AI had rendered Jeff Beck instead of Ronnie Wood. Jagger identified the error during a Zoom call with the video production team, noting that the AI had become confused by the shared performance history between Wood and Beck. The production team subsequently corrected the footage to ensure Ronnie Wood was accurately represented in the final cut.