Football legend Jimmy Johnson has been left furious after social media trolls created a now-viral clip of him ‘kissing’ a young NBC reporter on Monday night.
Johnson, 82, is a Miami football icon and he was on the sideline for the national championship game at Hard Rock Stadium, which the Indiana Hoosiers won 27-21 to down his Hurricanes and seal a first ever title.
For Johnson, though, things turned even more sour after the game when he noticed that an X user had turned an innocent pregame interview into something altogether more seedy – with the help of Elon Musk‘s Grok tool.
The iconic coach-turned analyst spoke to NBC’s Sara Cardona to preview the big game, and she posted an image of the interview to her 76,000 followers on X.
As has become a worryingly regular occurrence on the social media site, some users quickly instructed Grok to make the photo something it wasn’t, turning it into a video that involved the pair making out on the side of the field.
‘I had no idea you were so into grandpas,’ was the comment alongside the video, and Johnson quickly responded to make it clear – if it wasn’t already – that the incident didn’t actually occur.
X users had their way with the image and asked Grok to create an AI video of them kissing
‘This is fake… this is so wrong!’ Johnson wrote to his own 345,000 followers on X, inadvertently projecting the video far and wide, to the point that it had racked up over 1 million views around the world.
By lunchtime, the video had disappeared from X, with the social media site declaring that it ‘violated the rules’.
But the damage had been done for Johnson, who was left aghast that AI technology had been used in such a negative way for him and Cardona.
Johnson was met with varying degrees of sympathy from the masses on X, with some siding with him and agreeing that the video was completely inappropriate.
Cardona is a glamorous sideline reporter who works for a local NBC station in Miami
Johnson is a legendary football coach who won a national championship with Miami in 1987
‘They need to make certain forms of AI illegal,’ one wrote.
Others, though, poked fun at the two-time Super Bowl champion, with one ironically posting: ‘Thanks for clearing this up Jimmy, thought it was real for a sec.’
Another joked: ‘Jimmy, how is this fake? It’s literally on video. Have accountability, own up to it.’