Zelda Williams wants to make one thing clear: she’s not interested in seeing any AI-generated videos of her late father, Robin Williams. The director posted a strongly worded Instagram Story on Monday, denouncing the social media trend, where people use AI-generators to create videos of deceased celebrities, her father included.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Williams wrote. “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.”
Calling the videos “gross” and “maddening,” she continued: “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 continued. “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 concluded by slamming the very idea of Artificial Intelligence. “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. 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.”
Trending Stories
The filmmaker previously spoke out against the use of her father’s voice for AI in 2023, when recreating a person’s image or voice without their approval was one of the top concerns during the SAG-AFTRA strike.
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI,” she wrote at the time. “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.”
