Jack Osbourne takes responsibility for backlash over Ozzy’s planned AI avatar

Jack Osbourne has revisited the criticism surrounding his family’s plans to create an interactive AI representation of his father, Ozzy Osbourne. In a new appearance on the Great Company With Jamie Laing podcast, Jack acknowledged that the initial announcement did not clearly explain what the family intended to build.

The backlash, it was my own fault. It was, like, we’d just kind of figured this thing out, that we were gonna do it, and I guess I wasn’t properly armed with the way to properly explain what it was. And I think people thought that next thing you know, it’s gonna be Ozzy Osbourne selling cell phones. It’s, like, no.

A lot of people are doing this now, where essentially by creating the A.I. model and creating the digital fingerprint of whoever, whatever, whether it’s my father or Bob Marley’s people are doing it, and Michael Jackson’s team are doing it, by kind of creating this digital fingerprint, you ultimately will own the digital I.P. [intellectual property] and image of that person. And so as to what it can be used for now, yeah, there’s a handful of things.

But down the road, it’s where things are going. It’s no different than saying, ‘I wanna own my images of my father. I wanna own his intellectual property,’ whatever. It’s just another avenue. And the fact that A.I. is what it is, it’s not going anywhere, it’s not changing, it was our choice to go, ‘Hey, we should be out in front of this, and we should not be on the back foot with having this kind of new pillar of entertainment properly locked down.

The project was introduced earlier in 2026 through a partnership involving Hyperreal and Proto Hologram. The companies have described plans for a digital Ozzy capable of interacting with audiences. Jack and Sharon Osbourne previously said the system would use a controlled collection of approved information rather than drawing unrestricted responses from the internet.

Questions about permission, representation and the commercial use of late artists’ likenesses remain part of the broader debate around AI entertainment. For the Osbourne family, Jack’s latest comments place the emphasis on how the project was explained, rather than announcing a change to its underlying plans.