A fake AI-generated interview sparked fury in Michael Schumacher’s family. Corinna is taking legal action against the magazine that claimed to have answers from the driver himself.
The German magazine published an interview claiming it was the first discussion with the seven-time Formula One World Champion’s first, following the 2013 ski crash. The front cover of the Die Aktuelle magazine sparked curiosity, but also anger. Only at the bottom of the page did the publication announce that it was just an AI-generated conversation.
Enraged, the family will take legal action against the magazine that deceived public and disrespected the former driver and his condition, Reuters reports. The now 54-year has not appeared in public since December 2013, the day he suffered the brain-damaging injury during skiing in Meribel, in the French Alps. That was almost ten years ago. A decade long of therapy behind closed doors, with the family trying to keep the driver’s condition a secret from the media and the fans.
The closest they could get to information was the “Schumacher” documentary running on Netflix, explaining how the accident changed the family’s life. But there was no footage of the driver, nor any statements from him. Only members of the Schumacher family and close friends revealed little about how they’re trying to cope with the injury that left the legendary driver fighting for his life.
So it was only natural that when Die Aktuelle claimed that they had “answers from him” in the “first interview since the crash,” people rushed to check them out.
“My life has completely changed since. That was a horrible time for my wife, my children, and the whole family. I was so badly injured that I lay for months in a kind of artificial coma because otherwise, my body couldn’t have dealt with it all,” was just one of the deceiving AI-generated answers, generated via a program called characer.ai and attributed to Michael Schumacher.
“It sounded deceptively real,” read a strapline underneath.
