Celebrities Were Deepfaked Into an Anti-Hate Message They Never Actually Gave
What happened
In February 2025, a deepfake video created by Israeli digital marketers Guy Bar and Ori Bejerano began circulating online, depicting well-known celebrities appearing to condemn antisemitic statements made by Kanye West. The video spread rapidly across social media platforms before questions about its origins drew scrutiny. None of the celebrities shown in the footage had agreed to appear in it, and none had been contacted before the video was published.
The creators did not conceal that the video was AI-generated, but they proceeded without obtaining consent from any of the people whose likenesses they used. Among those depicted was Scarlett Johansson, who publicly responded after the video surfaced and objected to the unauthorized use of her image and likeness. The marketers appear to have operated on the assumption that the celebrities shown would, in principle, endorse the message against antisemitism, treating the consent step as a formality rather than a legal and ethical requirement with independent force.
That assumption is the core problem the incident exposes. A deepfake does not become permissible because its creators believe the depicted people share the underlying sentiment. The video assigned specific speech acts to real individuals without their knowledge, generated realistic audio and video of them making statements they never made, and released that material into a media environment where distinguishing fabricated footage from real footage is already difficult for most viewers. The cause being advocated is irrelevant to that structural problem.
The incident fits a recognizable pattern: someone identifies a message they consider unambiguously correct, reaches for generative tools to amplify it, and treats the ethical requirements around consent as obstacles that good intentions should excuse. Johansson's public objection, combined with press coverage that framed the video as an example of AI misuse rather than a successful counter-messaging effort, made clear that the political intent did not neutralize the harm of using her face without permission.
What remains unresolved is a gap no current platform policy or legal framework has closed: there is no requirement that a deepfake creator demonstrate consent before publishing, no centralized record of who authorized the use of a given person's likeness, and no mechanism for verifying after the fact what instructions a system actually received and from whom. A provable record of what a system did and whether the affected parties authorized it would not have prevented this video from being made, but it would have made the accountability question answerable before the footage spread rather than weeks after.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index. The event is also catalogued in the following database, which is listed for cross-reference.