You can virtually bring back the dead with AI. Should you?
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Michelle had barely knotted her apron strings before the day turned ugly.
“When I told her I could only serve regular coffee—not the waffle-flavored one she wanted—she threw the boiling-hot pot at me,” she tells Fast Company, recounting one violent encounter with a customer.
Working at a popular all-day breakfast chain, Michelle has learned that customer “service” often means surviving other people’s rage: “I’ve been cussed out, had hot food thrown on me…even dodged a plate thrown at my head,” she says. Lately, the sexual comments from male customers have gotten worse. (Workers in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.)
Still, she shows up, because she hopes to save enough to launch her own business soon.
Once upon a time, “the customer is king” was a rallying cry for better service. Today, it’s a management mantra gone feral. What began as good business sense, touted by historic retail magnates like Marshall Field and Harry Selfridge, has curdled into a corporate servitude that treats employees as expendable shock absorbers for awful behavior and diva demands.
With the holiday rush looming, customer-facing workers in cafés, call centers and car garages are bracing themselves to smile through every client’s tantrum—no matter how absurd.
At Michelle’s workplace, the patron always comes first, while the safety of staff barely makes the list. Even after several viral videos of incidents at the chain’s restaurants, she says her complaints rarely go anywhere.
One of her managers will step in if he sees something on the floor that’s out of line, but others just ask what she did to provoke it. “It makes me angry, yet I feel I just have to take it,” she says. “It’s an epidemic.” That dynamic is baked into North American service culture.
“The ‘customer is king’ mantra has become a free pass for people to act however they want, with impunity,” says Gordon Sayre, a professor at Emlyon Business School in Lyon, France, who has been studying its impact on employees. “It breeds entitlement—and that entitlement gets abused, leaving workers with almost no room to push back.”
The mantra dictates that service staff stay deferential—careful about their every word and gesture—while clients hold the upper hand. With some workers getting all of their take-home pay from tips and gratuity, customers can quite literally decide how much an employee earns. And according to Sayre’s research, that mix of financial power and enforced politeness makes sexual harassment at on the job more likely.
The data mirrors reality. In a 2025 survey of 21,000 U.S. frontline workers in healthcare, food service, education, retail, transportation, more than half (53%) said they’d recently faced verbally abusive, threatening or unruly customers.
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You can virtually bring back the dead with AI. Should you?
By Thomas Smith
As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Google’s Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color.
Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame.
This is the kind of thing AI lets you do now—virtually bring back the dead.
As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should.
The sketch, which The Atlantic has already called SNL’s “Black Mirror Moment”, features Ashley Padilla as an aging grandmother in a nursing home.
Her family members—played by Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernández—visit her on Thanksgiving, and use an AI photo app to bring her old family photos to life as short videos.
At first, things go well. Padilla’s character marvels over a black and white image of her father waving as he stands in front of a spinning ferris wheel.
But then, things go hilariously, predictably wrong. A photo of family members at a barbecue turns into a horror scene when the fictional AI app has Padilla’s father (played by host Glen Powell) roast the family dog, which happens to have no head.
As other photos come to life, Padilla’s father pays a bowling buddy to perform a lewd act, and in a baby photo, her mother’s torso splits from her body and floats around the frame as a nuclear bomb explodes in the background.
The sketch is hilarious because it’s so relatable. Anyone who has played with AI video generators knows that they can make delightfully wonky assumptions about the laws of physics—often with spectacular results.
In my testing of AI video generator RunwayML, for example, I asked the model to create a video of a playful kitten at sunset.
Things start out cute enough, until the kitten splits in two, with its front half attempting to exit stage right as its back half continues adorably cavorting around.
The rapid advancement of AI, while posing complex ethical questions, also sparks incredible creative possibilities. It's a reminder that our human ingenuity is key to navigating these new frontiers responsibly and ensuring technology serves our deepest values. Thinking about how we can harness these tools for good, perhaps to preserve cherished memories or connect with history in novel ways, is truly inspiring.
Front line workers should be supported and protected from abusive customers. Employees who are supported will provide greater value to customers
This plot line has been beaten to a pulp in science fiction. Can we stop pretending like AI is a magic wand? 🪄 Of course we need to evaluate the ethics of AI. I genuinely am so annoyed by these click bait headlines. This is not new information.