Business
Robin Williams’ daughter says ‘stop sending me AI videos of Dad’ because it’s ‘disgusting’ and ‘not what he’d want’
Zelda Williams, the 36-year-old daughter of the Oscar-winning actor and one of the greatest comedians of all time, Robin Williams, issued a strongly worded rebuke to people creating and sending her AI-generated videos of her late father, who died by suicide in August 2014. It was later discovered Williams was quietly suffering from Lewy body dementia. He was 63.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Williams wrote on Instagram on Monday. “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. But please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop,” she said. “It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
The timing of Williams’ post is not a coincidence: OpenAI this week released its Sora 2 video-generation tool on an invite-only basis, but despite the small number of people who have access to the service, social networks are already getting flooded with deepfakes of dead celebrities. OpenAI prohibits the creation of living public figures without consent, but the company told PCMag it allows for the generation of “historical figures,” which is somewhat of a loophole. One search through any social network like Meta’s Threads or Elon Musk’s X and you’ll find videos of the late rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. wrestling in a cage match, or the late zookeeper and conservationist Steve Irwin tackling the stingray that killed him.
“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,” she said.
“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 added. “Gross.”
In one final message, Williams rejected those who say AI is progressive technology.
“And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future,’” she said. “Al is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. 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.”
This is not Zelda Williams’ first time publicly pushing back against artificial intelligence. Back in October 2023, during the height of the SAG-AFTRA strike that was largely focused on creatives demanding protection from AI taking their jobs, Williams again spoke out on Instagram, calling those using AI to recreate her father’s iconic voice “personally disturbing.”
“I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad,” she wrote. “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.”
Fortune reached out to OpenAI about the rampant recreation of dead celebrities with Sora 2. The company did not immediately respond to comment.
