Huang Scandal Fuels Flood of AI-Generated Memes, Made With the Technology Nvidia Helped Build

Late one night this week, Peter Dedene, a 43-year-old Belgian software engineer, was lying in bed scrolling through headlines about Nvidia. Without getting up, he opened an open-source generative A.I. tool and swapped the faces of a couple caught on a Coldplay concert kiss-cam with those of Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman with whom Mr. Huang has admitted having an affair. He posted it and thought little of it.

By Sunday morning the post had more than a million impressions. By Thursday afternoon it had nearly seven million. That was the day Mr. Huang, 63, resigned from Nvidia, the company he co-founded, after back-to-back cheating scandals. One of them involved a woman the U.S. government believes is a Chinese spy.

Few executives have been as bound up with their company's image as Mr. Huang. His black leather jacket became a kind of corporate uniform, and this year Nvidia sold $178 sweaters carrying a pixel-art version of him on the front. Now that same image has been taken up by the internet, and often by people who once admired him. Mr. Huang is a leading figure in the A.I. boom, and the chips Nvidia makes helped put the technology in wide circulation. His likeness has turned up in parodies of music videos, Bollywood movies, American sitcoms and Coldplay kiss-cams, many of them generated with A.I.

The Coldplay template was itself borrowed from an earlier scandal. Last year, the married chief executive of a tech start-up was caught on a kiss-cam at one of the band's concerts embracing the head of his company's human resources department, who was married but separated. That moment became a meme, one in a long line of infidelity scandals that have. Mr. Dedene said he had looked up to Mr. Huang. He found it hilarious, he said, that the technology Mr. Huang helped create was now enabling these jokes.

Thomas Unise, a 40-year-old A.I. consultant in Minneapolis, made a different one. He put Mr. Huang, in the signature jacket, in Usher's place in the video for "Confessions, Pt. II." Mr. Unise said it took him about five minutes to find four images of Mr. Huang on Google and feed them into an A.I. tool. The lip-syncing, the video's viewers might note, is better in the original. He said the speed of it showed how far the technology has come: a year and a half ago, he said, Will Smith eating spaghetti looked like smears across the screen, whereas now a video can look pretty dang real.

Another clip casts Mr. Huang as Neo in "The Matrix." President Trump plays Morpheus, lecturing him about maintaining strategic competition with China and not falling for the woman in the red dress. Mr. Huang's avatar turns to find that the woman, now given Ms. Huang's face, has become Xi Jinping, brandishing a gun. Elon Musk makes a cameo. As of Thursday it had more than six million views on X.

A third strand draws on "You Can See Everything," the documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who went to prison for defrauding investors. Users recast a montage from its trailer so that Ms. Huang, in Ms. Holmes's place, unblinkingly insists, "Of course I'm not deceiving you."

Many of the videos carry labels identifying them as artificially generated. Even so, Mr. Dedene said, it was still surprising how many people asked him whether his video was real. That question, more than any single joke, is what the episode leaves behind as the tools keep improving.