by Daniel Johnson
October 18, 2025
MLK’s daughter Bernice King urged people on social media to stop using OpenAI’s Sora 2 tool to create inappropriate videos of her father.
As previously reported by BLACK ENTERPRISE, Bernice King — daughter of the late civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — joined Zelda Williams, daughter of the late comedian Robin Williams, in urging people on social media to stop using OpenAI’s Sora 2 tool to create inappropriate videos of their fathers, emphasizing that neither would have consented to such use if they were alive.
As CNN reported, following their protests, and extended conversations with Bernice King on behalf of King, Inc., and John Hope Bryant and the AI Ethics Council, on Oct. 16, Open AI announced in a statement that it would allow estates of public figures or other authorized figures to request the removal of likenesses from its database.
Statement from OpenAI and King Estate, Inc.
The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr.…
— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) October 17, 2025
“While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, OpenAI believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used. Authorized representatives or estate owners can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos,” the company wrote.
What the company glosses over in its statement is any real discussion of ethics, although it does note that it had extended dialogue with the AI Ethics Council, the company’s decision to essentially launch Sora 2 without making any real attempts to put up guardrails regarding the deceased goes hand in hand with how the tech industry in general approaches the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
This includes, among other things, the hoovering up of water and other finite environmental resources, training its datasets on the intellectual property of others without their consent, and building data centers which are in part subsidized by increased utility bills for people who did not consent to footing the bill for the increased drain on power grids created by these structures.
According to The Week UK, in addition to these concerns, misinformation experts caution that Sora’s realistic content presents a problem for media manipulation on a scale hitherto unseen. Indeed, as Lance Ulanoff noted in an op-ed for Tech Radar, this public debacle regarding the likenesses of deceased public figures represents the latest instance of the company’s propensity to ask for forgiveness, not permission.
“The comments (from Altman) echo what he told (TED CEO Chris) Anderson in (an) April (interview) and follow Altman and OpenAI’s well-worn pattern of rolling out new features, seeing how quickly and badly things break, and then mopping up,” Ulanoff wrote.
Vice, meanwhile, noted in their analysis that although the videos generated by the app have a noticeable watermark, there remain concerns that among a populace that has a well-documented history with media literacy, including, for example, continually misattributing a 21st Century quote to James Baldwin, who died in 1987, misinformation will likely spread, irregardless of their attempts to control it.
While it is good that OpenAI has, for now, put the brakes on the more unethical aspects of Sora 2, unfortunately, a technology whose very business model is built on inequality and seems to operate outside of the bounds of digital ethics cannot magically be made to comply with an ethical framework, even if Sora 2’s users can now no longer continue to disrespect the legacy of Dr. King.
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