Jack Osbourne has accepted the blame for the initial backlash to the news of an Ozzy Osbourne AI-driven digital avatar.
Jack and Sharon Osbourne were panelists at the 2026 Licensing Expo this past May where they announced the project, along with Jack making a comment about its potential usage.
“You could shoot a template for a commercial … literally prompt what you want Digital Ozzy to do in that commercial and you just drop it in. It’s that simple now,” he said at the event.
After the overwhelmingly negative response to those comments, which read to many Ozzy fans as crass capitalization on the metal icon’s death, Jack accepted blame for that response on a recent episode of Great Company with Jamie Laing.
Osbourne said, “The backlash, it was my own fault. 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. I think people thought that next thing it’s gonna be Ozzy Osbourne selling cell phones. No.”
Jack elaborated that the concept was closer to an aspect of intellectual property ownership. “A lot of people are doing this now,” he said. “Creating the AI model and creating the digital fingerprint of whoever – whether it’s my father or Bob Marley’s people are doing it, and Michael Jackson’s team are doing it.”
He continued, “By kind of creating this digital fingerprint, you ultimately will own the digital IP 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.'”
Jack’s comments align with Sharon’s own response to the backlash. In an interview with Metal Hammer in August, Sharon said, “I’ve seen such shit online about it being a ‘money grab.’ Why would I need to do that? It’s not as if I’m using Ozzy to sell fucking weedkiller or beer.”
Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning, a new concert film documenting the event which served as the final performances for both Ozzy and Sabbath, hits movie theaters this Wednesday, October 28th.
Watch the full episode of Great Company with Jamie Laing featuring Jack Osbourne below.