Jack Osbourne Takes Blame for AI Ozzy Backlash: ‘It Was My Own Fault’

Jack Osbourne has taken the blame for the backlash over his family’s plan to create an AI version of Ozzy Osbourne. His mistake, he says, was announcing it before he knew how to explain it.

Speaking on Great Company with Jamie Laing, Jack admitted the response had caught him off guard.

“The backlash, it was my own fault,” he said. “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.”

When the Osbournes announced the project in May, plenty of fans weren’t keen on the idea of a computer-generated Ozzy speaking for the late Black Sabbath frontman. Jack now believes people assumed the family was preparing to lend his father’s image to advertising.

“And I think people thought that next thing it’s gonna be Ozzy Osbourne selling cell phones. No.”

That’s not the plan he’s describing. He says the priority is to establish control over Ozzy’s digital likeness as AI-generated versions of famous people become increasingly common.

Working with digital-human company Hyperreal and hologram specialist Proto, the family plans to create an interactive version of Ozzy that can speak and respond to fans. The Osbournes have said it will draw on approved material, with the family involved in what the avatar can say and do (per Louder Sound).

There’s a tension in Jack’s argument, though. At the project’s unveiling in Las Vegas, he also discussed how straightforward it had become to put a digital Ozzy into a commercial. So while he’s rejecting the idea of his dad flogging phones, the wider question of commercial use hasn’t disappeared.

Ozzy passed last July (2025), weeks after his final performance at Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning concert in Birmingham.

Jack sees a way to keep his father’s image under family control. But for fans uncomfortable with the technology, there’s still the prospect of a version of Ozzy saying things the man himself never said.

Whatever form the project eventually takes, the Osbournes will have to decide where preservation ends and impersonation begins.