Was Chris Rock Wearing A Face Pad When Will Smith Slapped Him?

The Internet is full of very off conspiracy theories and there’s a new one suggesting that Chris Rock was wearing a pad on his face when Will Smith slapped him at the Oscars.

I’ve noticed quite a few people on the Internet saying that the whole Rock vs. Smith slap at the Oscars was staged.

A number of these people like to point to images they’ve found on the web that prove this new conspiracy theory to be true.

They point to some images which have been ‘upscaled to 8K’ which show that Rock was wearing a face pad on his cheek.

So, first off, these conspiracy theories are utter rubbish, and I want to explain why.

Was Chris Rock wearing a pad on his face at the Oscars?

Credit: Chris Pizzello (AP)

Read more: Has Will Smith Ruined His Career After Chris Rock Oscars Slap?

The image you can see above is one of the ones that have been going around the web and specifically on Twitter.

People are saying that the 8K image clearly shows Rock was wearing a pad before Smith slapped him.

The first thing I have to point out here is that a tiny pad like this one would literally do nothing against a slap of the velocity that Smith inflicted on Chris Rock.

It’s covering such a small part of his face and would not stop the comedian from getting hurt.

The other thing is that you can look at the images that were taken on the night by professional photographers and then posted to Getty almost immediately.

Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP (Getty Images)

Take a close look at this HD image, and it becomes clear that there was no pad on Rock’s face after the slap.

Maybe, Smith’s slap might have caused the pad to fall to the ground?

Well, you can look at the footage for yourselves and see that there’s no such pad coming off of Chris Rock’s face after the slap.

I’m also pretty sure that many conspiracy theorists will be saying that the Getty photographers are in on the act as well.

Well, that would require such incredible organisation and orchestration that it would be nigh on impossible to get so many people in on it without something other than a clearly doctored image turning up online.

Why do people think the slap was fake?

Credit: Twitter

Read more: Will Smith Apologises To Chris Rock For Oscar Slap

The question is, where did these images of a pad on Chris Rock’s face come from?

Well, there are two possible answers.

The first one is that these are a pretty good photoshop job.

People make fake images all the time to troll the Internet.

However, the more likely answer is it’s all to do with artificial intelligence.

There are a bunch of AI apps that people use to ‘upscale’ images, and I think that’s what’s happened here.

One such app is called Remini which is available for iPhone and it works pretty well.

It allows people to ‘scale up’ or ‘enhance’ images – yes, like in a Hollywood action movie.

You just have to press a button that says ‘enhance’ and voilà, you get a clear picture of what started off a grainy image.

However, what these AI apps end up doing is a lot of guess work, and given that the images of Chris Rock’s face before the slap were very low res, it would make sense for an AI to make a mistake, such as thinking a blemish on Rock’s cheek was some sort of plaster.

These programs have a tendency of adding information rather by extrapolating from what’s already there.

What’s going to happen to Will Smith after the slap?

Credit: ABC

Read more: Chris Rock Not Pressing Charges Against Will Smith After Oscar Slap

Interestingly enough, Gizmodo tried putting the image of Chris Rock’s face before getting the shit slapped out of it by Will Smith’s hand through Remini and the result was very interesting.

You can check out the image they ended up with below:

Credit: Gizmodo

You can clearly see that the AI struggles with Chris Rock’s cheek and creates some sort of padding-like thing on it.

The truth is, these apps also struggle with darker skin tones.

They are unable to accurately detect darker skin tones and the AI ends up creating these sorts of strange-looking images.

So, that’s how we ended up with this very odd conspiracy theory – AI apps messing images up and I also think that people knew this to begin with.

They thought it was funny and started spreading the conspiracy theory on Twitter and other social media platforms.

It all snowballed to where we are now, with a lot of people thinking the whole thing was somehow staged.

As for Will Smith, the mere fact that The Academy’s governors are gathering tomorrow to discuss disciplinary actions against the actor is proof that this incident was not faked.

Smith could very possibly end up getting banned for a number of years from the Oscars as a result of this slap.

What do you make of this conspiracy theory?

Did you believe that Chris Rock was wearing a face pad at the Oscars?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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