Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has spoken out against AI-generated content featuring her father.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda wrote in an Instagram story 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. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.
“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 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.”
Robin Williams and Zelda at the 2006 premiere of his film RV. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/REUTERS
It is not the first time Zelda Williams, an actor and film-maker who directed 2024 horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein, has called out AI recreations of her father, who died in 2014 aged 63. In 2023, in an 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.
“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’ latest post comes as celebrity deepfakes continue to proliferate across social media, in everything from pornographic and political content to scams and advertising.
In January, actor Scarlett Johansson warned of the “imminent dangers of AI” after a deepfake video of her and other prominent Jewish celebrities including Jerry Seinfeld, Drake and Adam Sandler, speaking out against antisemitic comments made by Kanye West, went viral.
In August, a scam ad featuring a deepfake of Crowded House frontman Neil Finn falsely talking about erectile dysfunction went viral, prompting the band to issue a disclaimer.
The Robin Williams deepfakes are part of a broader trend of AI slop – low-quality content generated for entertainment – fuelled by the rapid growth of free-to-use generative AI apps.
Several recent videos of Robin Williams on TikTok appear to have been created using OpenAI’s new video generator app, Sora 2, including a fake ad for Apple and an awards ceremony interaction between the comedian and the late Betty White.
Within a few days of launching, Sora’s feed was flooded with videos featuring copyrighted characters from shows such as SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, Pokémon and Rick and Morty.
OpenAI told the Guardian that content owners can flag copyright infringement using a “copyright disputes form” but that individual artists or studios cannot have a blanket opt-out. Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, said: “We’ll work with rights holders to block characters from Sora at their request and respond to takedown requests.”
