Jack Osbourne has told the Great Company With Jamie Laing podcast that the anger at the Ozzy Osbourne A.I. avatar was his own doing.
"The backlash, it was my own fault," he said. "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 you know, it's gonna be Ozzy Osbourne selling cell phones. It's, like, no."
The project comes from the family together with Hyperreal, the company behind the patented Digital DNA process, and Proto Hologram, and is meant to let the avatar speak with people and respond as he would.
His argument is about ownership rather than about the technology. Building the model, he said, is how an estate ends up holding the digital likeness and intellectual property of the person, the way the people around Bob Marley and Michael Jackson are also doing it. "It was our choice to go, hey, we should be out in front of this, and we should not be on the back foot."
On an earlier episode of The Osbournes podcast he said the system is closed and offline, trained only on things his father said or that were written accurately about him. "This isn't ChatGPT with dad's face on it."