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Videos showing Stephen Hawking being violently humiliated were reported on Sora 2 in October 2025. They were AI-generated depictions, not recordings of real events. The reporting documents a powerslap that knocked over Hawking’s wheelchair; it does not establish how widely the clips circulated or that OpenAI imposed a Hawking-specific ban. Sora itself was discontinued on April 26, 2026, according to OpenAI’s current product page.
What the reported Sora 2 videos showed
The Guardian reported on October 17, 2025 that Sora contained videos depicting Hawking receiving a “#powerslap” that knocked his wheelchair over. These were synthetic videos generated with Sora 2, not footage of an actual incident.
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The report placed the Hawking clips among other troubling portrayals of deceased celebrities and public figures. The available reporting does not establish a count of Hawking videos, their audience or reach, or their effects. It is therefore more accurate to describe them as reported examples than to claim they went viral.
Why depictions of deceased people sparked concern
Making a recognizable person appear to do or suffer something they never did raises questions beyond whether an image is labeled as AI. A synthetic portrayal can be degrading, misleading, or at odds with how a person’s family believes their legacy should be treated. The Washington Post’s October 11, 2025 coverage described objections from relatives of other deceased public figures and framed the issue as an unresolved dispute over identity, legacy, and posthumous use of likeness.
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Henry Ajder, a generative AI expert quoted by The Guardian, warned: “People fear that a world saturated with this kind of content is going to lead to a distortion of these people and how they’re remembered.” That concern is about the cumulative influence of synthetic portrayals; the cited reports do not measure any effect from the Hawking clips specifically.
The legal position is also unsettled. The Guardian described uncertainty around postmortem publicity rights and platform liability. That is not a legal finding about these particular videos, and the available reporting does not establish litigation over them or the current view of Hawking’s estate.
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- Brief Answers to the Big Questions Hardcover – October 16, 2018
What OpenAI said its safeguards did
In its September 30, 2025 launch materials, OpenAI described Sora 2 as a video and audio generation model and identified nonconsensual likeness use and misleading generations among the risks it aimed to address. OpenAI said its safeguards included checks on prompts and outputs for harmful content, consent-based use of character likenesses, visible and invisible provenance signals on generated videos, and a way for users to report abuse. These are the company’s descriptions of its controls, not independent evidence that they reliably prevented or removed harmful content.
- Before and during generation: OpenAI described prompt and output checks, as well as consent-based likeness use.
- Provenance: The company said videos included visible and invisible signals indicating their origin. A visible label and embedded provenance information are distinct mechanisms; neither, by itself, proves that a viewer noticed the label or that a video could not be misleading.
- After publication: OpenAI said users could report videos for abuse. The cited materials do not establish how quickly reports were handled or whether a report about a Hawking clip resulted in enforcement.
OpenAI’s Sora 2 System Card and launch safety description lay out the company’s stated approach. The reviewed material does not provide a Hawking-specific assessment of how well those protections worked, or enough information to compare the treatment of living people with that of historical or deceased figures.
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Did OpenAI ban Stephen Hawking videos?
The cited coverage does not establish a Hawking-specific ban. The Guardian reported a different, identifiable response: after a request from Martin Luther King Jr.’s estate, OpenAI paused generations depicting King and said it was strengthening guardrails for historical figures. It also reported that OpenAI had begun allowing representatives of recently deceased public figures to request blocks, though details were not defined at the time. Those actions concerned King and the broader policy; they should not be treated as evidence of a specific action for Hawking.
In the broader policy context, an OpenAI spokesperson told The Guardian: “While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, we believe that public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used.” That statement reflects the company’s position as reported in October 2025, not proof that a particular restriction applied to Hawking’s likeness.
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Is Sora still available?
No. OpenAI’s current Sora launch page states that the Sora product was no longer available as of April 26, 2026. That later status does not change what was reported about Sora 2 in 2025, and the cited sources do not establish the full status of any successor products or policies.
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