Zelda Williams, daughter of the late, great Robin Williams, has a simple message for fans of her father’s work: “please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad.”
The Lisa Frankenstein filmmaker took to Instagram and posted a now-unavailable story addressing the onslaught of AI videos featuring a likeness of her legendary father. “Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. If you’re just trying to troll me, I’ve seen way worse, I’ll restrict and move on,” read the Instagram story, according to The Guardian.
While Williams was speaking specifically about her late father’s legacy, she also made known her antipathy for AI-generated material in general. “But please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop,” she wrote. “It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
Williams decried how her father’s legacy has been “condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’” and then used by other people to “churn out horrible TikTok slop.”
“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,” she continued. And in case she wasn’t clear, she added the following exclamation to her invective: “Gross.”
Robin Williams was a beloved comedian and actor who memorably starred in classic films like Dead Poets Society (1989), Aladdin (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and Good Will Hunting (1997), for which he won an Oscar for best supporting actor. In 2014, Williams died by suicide at his home in Paradise Cay, California at the age of 63. According to his widow, Susan Schneider, the actor had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was suffering from depression and anxiety at the time of his death. He was survived by his Schneider and his three children: Zachary, Cody, and Zelda.
This isn’t the first time that Zelda Williams has spoken up about AI-content featuring her father. In another Instagram post in 2023, Zelda lent her voice to support the Screen Actors Guild’s campaign against AI. “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 wrote. “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. 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.”
Williams ended her most recent Instagram story by begging those in the industry to divest from AI technology. “And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed,” she wrote. “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.”
Original story appeared in VF España.
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