“Bro got so bored he started beefing [with] his alter ego.”
Please Stand Up
As part of his purported comeback, Marshall “Eminem” Mathers used AI-generated imagery of what he looked like during his “Slim Shady” era to stage an interview-cum-intervention with his former self — and it looks, like “Triumph” the Insult Comic Dog might say, like absolute dogshit.
“Somewhere in the Detroit multiverse, Slim Shady has escaped his 2002 timeline and popped through a portal to terrorize 2024,” Complex wrote in its blog post about the crappy video, which is part of a cover story package geared towards Eminem’s new album, fittingly titled “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce).”
In the video, the current-day brown-bearded Mathers is seen sitting in a blue velvet-curtained room — a potential David Lynch send-up? — next to an empty chair that, a few seconds in, is filled with a scratchy hologram of his de-aged past self.
“Guess who’s back,” the de-aged AI Shady quips, a shitty simulacrum of the mocking tone on Eminem’s 2002 hit “Without Me” that has made Mathers millions.
Eminem: “I wrote Stan and Love the Way You Lie”
Slim Shady: “Congratulations you wrote the national anthem for stalkers and domestic abusers”
LMAOOOOOO this interview is wild pic.twitter.com/a6dFOkjF1v
— Wost🐰 (@mosthiphop) July 30, 2024
Testy Exchange
After making a needless transphobic joke, the crappily-de-aged Eminem begins to tear into his more aged contemporary self, a heavy-handed play on the rapper’s infamous inner turmoil that not only led to his need to get sober, but also to his various personas, too.
“You’re not fuckin’ Taylor Swift,” the AI Shady quipped. “You had one era that mattered: mine.”
Throughout the bizarre exchange — which, we cannot emphasize enough, was supposed to be taking place between the Eminem of 2024 and the Slim Shady of the early 2000s — the rapper spoke defensively to his younger self, and the pissing contest posturing between the avatar and the actual man was made all the more uncanny by just how bad the AI de-aging job really was.
As the YouTube video’s summary notes, the AI effects in question were undertaken by a firm called Metaphysic AI — the same company behind the forthcoming film “Here,” which digitally de-ages Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in a similarly weird manner.
While most responses in the YouTube comments commend the rapper for the AI stunt, one stuck out to us.
“Bro got so bored,” the commentator wrote, “he started beefing [with] his alter ego.”
If that doesn’t describe Em’s comeback era, we don’t know what does.
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