Last week, somewhere amid the World Cup frenzy, a now-viral video circulated of Norwegian striker Erling Haaland mid-mouthful in a restaurant, glancing left and flinching at his own reflection. One post on X sharing the video racked up more than 31 million views in mere days. But here's the thing: It isn't him. Fact checkers traced the footage to a slapstick skit by the Chinese comedian Jin Long, posted to TikTok in mid-June. The corrections were duly noted, and yet the clip kept traveling anyway. By the fourth week of the 2026 World Cup, the internet had already decided who Erling Haaland is. AI or not, in the video, Haaland was in character. If the old model of stardom was a white-knuckle grip on your own image, the new one, as evidenced in Haaland's recent internet fame, is being a character so vivid, so relentlessly meme-able, that AI can do the hype thing for you. The celebrity, therefore, becomes something like an open-source character, only loosely tethered to the human who...
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