Zelda Williams, the daughter of actor and comedian Robin Williams, has pleaded with fans to stop making AI-generated content of her father.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Williams wrote on Instagram. “Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t.”
She has been a long-time critic of Artificial Intelligence, particularly when it comes to her deceased father’s image, but also more widely, in showbiz.
Williams pleaded with the creators. “If you’re just trying to troll me, I’ve seen way worse, I’ll restrict and move on. But please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
She added, “To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.
“And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed,” she concluded. “You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”
It is not the first time Williams has spoken out against deepfakes of her father. Back in 2023, she voiced her support for the SAG-AFTRA strike after they listed AI recreations as a “mandatory subject of bargaining.”
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI,” Williams wrote on Instagram. “I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad. This isn’t theoretical, it is very very real.”
She added, “I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings.”
“Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance.
“These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for.”
The uptick in Williams-related AI slop videos appears to be related to the rollout of Sora 2, OpenAI’s latest generative video app, which included fake clips of the late comedian performing stand-up comedy and presenting an award show with Betty White.
In a statement to The Guardian, OpenAI said that while the company will address copyright infringements on a case-by-case basis, there is no option for individual artists or studios to consent to a blanket opt-out.
“We’ll work with rights holders to block characters from Sora at their request and respond to takedown requests,” Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media, told the publication.
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