Serena Williams’ Husband Shuts Down Trolls While Honoring Late Mother With AI Tribute

Alexis Ohanian’s passion for technology knows no limits. After co-founded Reddit in 2005, his journey has been shaped by both innovation and deep personal experiences. Tragically, in 2008, just as Reddit was gaining traction, his mother, Anke Ohanian, passed away from terminal brain cancer. He openly shared that her “diagnosis had a tremendous impact on my career and life,” emphasizing that her unwavering support for 25 years fueled his early determination, especially when Reddit was sold. Telling her about the sale was “the best phone call I ever made.” Over the years, Ohanian has shown himself to be someone who loves sharing moments with his family, from videos and photos of Serena Williams to his their two daughters. But he never got to do the same with his mother. That is, until AI changed things for him.

On June 22, Alexis shared a heartwarming picture of himself as a young boy with his mother alongside an AI-generated video showing them hugging. The moment was touching, especially considering the emotions he expressed in his tweet. He wrote, “Damn, I wasn’t ready for how this would feel. We didn’t have a camcorder, so there’s no video of me with my mom. I dropped one of my favorite photos of us in midjourney as ‘starting frame for an AI video’ and wow… This is how she hugged me. I’ve rewatched it 50 times.” But not everyone felt the same way.

Ohanian created the video using Midjourney, a generative AI program. As PetaPixel reported last week, Midjourney has just launched its first AI video generator model, letting users animate a still image. Ohanian’s latest video using the tool sparked debate and criticism online over the ethics of AI usage. Though deeply emotional for him, the video drew mixed reactions online. Many warned about creating fake memories with AI and how it could affect his mental health. But Ohanian was quick to calm concerns.

He tweeted the next day, “I lost my mom almost 20 years ago. Trolls can rest assured I’ve grieved sufficiently. My family couldn’t afford a camcorder and using tech to generate few seconds of animation from a still is the equivalent of using AI to stabilize a poorly recorded video — or fill in the gaps of a deteriorated video — of her (if we’d had it). It’s not a replacement for a loved one nor should it be.” But what was the problem?

Well, X is known for its cynical crowd. Many users slammed AI for creating false memories. Some even compared it to the Mirror of Erised from the first Harry Potter film, The Sorcerer’s Stone—the magical mirror where Harry gets lost, staring at an image of his two deceased parents. But for Serena Williams’ husband, it was different. He found the AI-generated video comforting and said it gave him even more reason to celebrate technology. Plus, he never misses a chance to speak about his mother.

Anke was always remembered as a brave woman. But for Ohanian, the word that sticks with him is “regret.” On the Spolitics with Jemele Hill podcast on November 7, he opened up about missing his mom.

He shared, “For all the milestones I’ve had since obviously coming back to Reddit, turning it around, IPO, and then just professionally as an investor and building 776. There are so many times I wish I could call her or I wish she could be there to see that debut of Athlos. Then there’s the personal stuff, which obviously I wish even more she could have been a part of.” And thanks to AI, he’s found a way to relive his childhood memories in a new way.

Serena Williams’ husband reveals how AI brought back memories of the past

Back in April, when AI image generation on ChatGPT and other platforms started trending, Alexis Ohanian shared a familiar feeling many young folks today might never get. On Instagram, he showed how his dive into AI-generated art unexpectedly became a portal to his past. The whimsical Studio Ghibli-style portraits of his family, including daughter Olympia, sparked a wave of creative fun. This playful twist stood in sharp contrast to his childhood sketches of buff superheroes. He said, “The 4o model does an amazing job generating images, and I’ve been playing around with it quite a bit,” but the slow, row-by-row image generation brought back a stark reminder of how different tech used to be.

Alexis Ohanian vividly recalled the agonizingly slow crawl of 33.6 dial-up connections—the days when the internet came with a modem and images loaded pixel by pixel. “I’m sitting there waiting for one of my AI images to generate. And it’s out of focus at first, and it starts to load row by row,” he shared.

He pictured today’s kids, used to instant digital magic, facing a fresh kind of frustration. “It reminds me that history may not always repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. And this is a fun, nostalgic moment, waiting for my AI-generated Ghibli portrait of the family to be created.”

Later, Ohanian kept the AI creativity flowing with more Ghibli-inspired images on X. Tagging The Athletic’s Evan Parker, he playfully suggested, “OK hear me out @evaneparker what if we built a way to turn your @onMantel profile photo into a trading card from your favorite year/set—can you guess all of these?”

Among the images was a pumped-up Ohanian celebrating a big win with a laptop and rocking a varsity jacket from his college days. He’s clearly riding the AI wave—and now, through technology, he’s reliving memories he never captured on video. Heartwarming or not, what do you think?