The Prince of Darkness may be gone, but an AI-powered hologram will aim to keep Ozzy Osbourne’s distinct voice, personality and mannerisms alive for fans.
Ozzy’s widow Sharon Osbourne and son Jack Osbourne revealed plans for the digital doppelganger this week at the Licensing Expo trade show in Las Vegas.
“You can ask Ozzy anything, and he will answer you in his own voice — and the answers will be what Ozzy would have said,” Sharon Osbourne said, according to a recap of the discussion by the publication License Global. “We’re going to take it all around the world. People can talk to him and he will talk back.”
At the annual show, artists, celebrities, entertainment studios and manufacturers make deals to license intellectual property. The Osbournes announced the hologram of the original Black Sabbath frontman and lead singer while discussing the future of the Osbourne brand during a moderated discussion on the show’s main stage.
“He will exist digitally as himself for as long as we have computers,” Jack Osbourne said. “Technology has come such a long way to where it’s almost drag and drop. 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.”
Ozzy Osbourne, sometimes dubbed the godfather of heavy metal, died last year at 76, following a lengthy career in which he constantly reinvented himself. Interest in him shows no signs of slowing. Sony Pictures is working on a biopic scheduled for a 2028 theatrical release, and Working Class Hero, an exhibit honoring his life at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, continues through the end of September.
Now, as soon as late summer, will come a digital lookalike that endeavors to extend that legacy further, interacting with fans in the US and UK in multiple languages and responding to them individually in real time while appearing to make eye contact.
This Hologram Can ‘Truly Read The Room’
“He’s not just a chatbot, he can truly read the room,” David Nussbaum, founder of Proto Hologram, one of the companies partnering with the Osbourne family for the project, said in an interview. “He might call out a Black Sabbath tattoo on a fan’s arm across the room, he might treat a group of execs in suits a bit differently than he’ll treat a gang of real headbangers, he might sense distraction in the room and do something to settle and focus the crowd.”
Other celebrities who have been made into holograms by Proto Hologram include Big Brother host Julie Chen Moonves, Elton John, Olivia Rodrigo, William Shatner and Kenan Thompson. At a 2024 exhibit of visual art by singer-songwriter Jewel at Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, her holographic twin greeted visitors.
The holograms require filming the subject using a 4K camera and a light source. The subject talks conversationally and moves naturally so the company’s proprietary software can learn their movements, voice tone and cadence.
Recreating lifelike versions of dead celebrities, however, clearly requires a different approach.
“Nothing is scraped from the internet, nothing is approximated and nothing is generated from data that wasn’t specifically and willingly given,” Remington Scott, CEO of Hyperreal, said in an interview. “The result operates in real time. This isn’t a pre-recorded video playing on a loop. It’s a living performance that can listen, respond and interact naturally.”
How Are Fans Reacting?
This won’t be the first time since Ozzy Osbourne died that he’ll be resurrected with artificial intelligence. Last year, Rod Stewart paid tribute to the rocker with an AI-generated video that showed him snapping selfies in heaven with dead celebrities including Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury. The segment sparked backlash, with some viewers criticizing it as “creepy and tasteless.”
The announcement of the upcoming Ozzy avatar has been met both with excitement and skepticism. “Let the man rest,” Joshua Hayes wrote in an X thread about the news. That was one of the more subdued negative responses, many of which focus around respecting the dead.
The broader question of how audiences ultimately respond to AI representations of deceased artists will be answered over time by the quality and integrity of what gets built, Scott of Hyperreal maintains. He said it’s a healthy conversation for the industry.
“We also believe that fans are smarter and more discerning than they’re sometimes given credit for,” he added. “When they experience something that genuinely captures the connection they felt with an artist, they recognize it. Jack Osbourne called the accuracy of this technology ‘scary.’ That reaction isn’t unease about artificiality, it’s recognition of something real.”
