"AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed." Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda has criticised AI-generated videos of her father, amid the rise in deepfakes courtesy of OpenAI's new video tool Sora 2.
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Zelda Williams, the actress, filmmaker and daughter of late actor Robin Williams, has spoken out against AI-generated content and asked fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father.
In a social media post, she said it was a “waste of time and energy” to send her content that featured digitally generated likenesses of her father, who died in 2014 aged 63.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” she wrote in her heartfelt post. “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. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
She continued, insightfully commenting on the growing trend of generating AI versions of celebrities who are no longer with us: “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.”
Williams ended her statement by saying she refuses to refer to AI as “the future”.
“And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future’. AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed. 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 the first time Zelda Williams has criticised the use of AI and deepfakes of her father.
In a 2023 Instagram post supporting the Screen Actors Guild’s campaign against AI, she wrote: “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. (...) 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.”
OpenAI’s new video tool Sora 2 has flooded social media platforms with AI-generated slop featuring deceased celebrities.
Earlier this year, actress Scarlett Johansson warned of the “imminent dangers of AI” following a viral deepfake video of her and prominent Jewish celebrities giving Kanye West the finger.
Robin Williams starred in countless classics including Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, The Birdcage, the very underrated Flubber, and Insomnia, and lent his voice to various roles – most notably the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin.
The beloved actor died by suicide at the age of 63. Prior to his death, the comedian had been struggling with health issues, including Lewy body dementia (LBD) – or diffuse Lewy body disease – an incurable brain disease which causes loss of motor function and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
