AI is supercharging celebrity death hoaxes — and Jackie Chan is the latest target

Jackie Chan isn’t dead — again.

But a viral Facebook image depicting the kung fu movie star lying on a bed fooled thousands of users into believing he was dead last week.

Celebrity death hoaxes have existed for generations, but experts say artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated the business of creating and spreading them.

AI tools make it easy to generate realistic photos, videos and fake obituaries at scale, turning hoaxes into a cheap and lucrative form of online misinformation. And while the rumors may sound harmless, researchers say they matter because they flood the internet with junk, exploit gaps in platform moderation and leave everyday users unsure of what to trust.

“I have absolutely seen this type of thing accelerate since AI got better at generating images and video,” said Alex Mahadevan, a faculty member and MediaWise director with Poynter, a journalism organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. “AI makes it easy to depict Jackie Chan lying on a bed holding a stuffed panda making it look like he’s on his deathbed.”

Chan has been declared dead online multiple times, including several hoaxes in 2011. He’s far from alone. Dozens of celebrities — from Tom Cruise to Jon Bon Jovi to Taylor Swift to President Donald Trump — have had premature online obituaries.

IMDb lists 60 actors who have been falsely declared dead and lived to read their own obits, including Tom Hanks, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Morgan Freeman and Betty White.

Hoaxes long predate the internet. Mark Twain supposedly joked that reports of his death were exaggerated more than a decade before he actually died in 1910. Paul McCartney was rumored to have died in 1966; he remains alive in 2025. What’s different now is the reach and speed of misinformation — and the financial incentives behind it.

Mahadevan said AI allows people to generate hoaxes “on thousands of platforms within hours.”

“Now someone can turn a celebrity hoax into a massive internet event, just on their own with AI,” he said.

The business behind fake celebrity deaths

So who creates these hoaxes, and why?

“It might be a bored Malaysian teenager, or a guy in India with a drop-shipping business,” Mahadevan said. “It could be anyone in the world, because people know that there’s money in this."

The model isn’t complicated. False celebrity death stories are used as clickbait to draw traffic to ad-heavy websites or to build up social media accounts that can be sold later. The bigger the star, the bigger the potential audience. Chan, with decades of international fame, is an easy lure.

The practice fills the internet with low-quality, misleading content.

“Even now, I’m having a difficult time telling what’s real and what’s fake,” Mahadevan said. “What it’s doing, is it’s polluting our online information ecosystem.”

Ben Colman, chief executive and co-founder of Reality Defender, an AI detection company in New York, said some hoax sites operate on the same logic as spam farms.

“Anything horrible like AI-generated obits, salacious pictures and so on can and has been productized and monetized,” Colman said.

He added that many such websites are stuffed with so many ads and pop-ups that “they’ll bring even the best workhorse laptop to a halt.” If one ad network bans them, he said, “they always find another, and the cycle goes on.”

The concept is not new. The New York Times reported in 2012 that fake death notices for Tony Danza and others had been generated on a website called Fake a Wish, a “celebrity fake news hoax generator.” The site still exists, featuring a tall tale about Prince Harry wrestling a gator and branding itself as “100% Complete and Utter Rubbish.”

“If you want to make money on content you need viewers,” said Walter Scheirer, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of "A History of Fake Things on the Internet."

He said the business model depends on luring people to a specific page or post and monetizing them through advertising. “So that’s the basic way historically that people have make money on this. The play is in advertising.”

Scheirer said hoaxers often build large followings with sensational content and then sell the account. He noted that Chan was targeted again partly because “Jackie Chan is not the youngest guy,” making rumors about a 71-year-old star more believable to casual users.

Much of the content, he added, is now AI-generated.

“It’s like crying wolf, but it’s sprinkled with a lot of other stuff,” Scheirer said. “Unfortunately the internet’s becoming more and more of this junk content, stuff that’s obviously fake but people keep sharing it.”

Hoaxers tend not to face consequences.

“It’s like a legal gray area, so it’s not like people are getting arrested in high-profile cases,” Scheirer said, likening the ecosystem to the mechanics of Nigerian Prince scams.

He said major platforms and ad networks are also part of the problem.

“They’re just allowing it to happen,” he said.

How AI has made the problem worse

AI tools can now produce realistic images, screenshots, news graphics and even video obituaries in seconds. That has transformed low-level misinformation into something nearly anyone can manufacture.

The latest Chan hoax spread on Facebook, but similar fake deaths circulate across TikTok, YouTube and other major platforms.

In a 2024 blog post, Google outlined efforts to combat “spammy low-quality content on Search,” much of it produced through automation to manipulate rankings. Google calls the practice “scaled content abuse.”

Celebrity death hoaxes use the same strategy: mass-produce fake content, push it across the web and monetize whatever clicks come in.

Scheirer said it’s unclear how lucrative the industry is, but he doesn’t believe most perpetrators make more than a few thousand dollars. “I don’t think anybody’s getting rich off of fake death announcements,” he said. “But depending on where you are in the globe, you can be making a decent amount of money.”

Once misinformation spreads, cleaning it up is difficult.

“Preventing this type of thing is extremely difficult, because they can be perpetrated by anyone, and lies and disinformation can spread instantly around the world,” said Alex Hamerstone, advisory solutions director for TrustedSec, a cybersecurity company in Fairlawn, Ohio. “The only way to repair the damage is through public relations, media and getting the story out that the person has not died.”

For everyday users scrolling through social media, the stakes are simple: a digital environment where it’s increasingly hard to tell what’s real.