Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has publicly condemned the proliferation of AI-generated videos featuring her father. In an Instagram story on Monday, she urged people to stop sending her such content, describing it as 'disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings'.
'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.'
Williams, an actor and filmmaker who directed the 2024 horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein, criticised the trend of reducing legacies to 'vaguely looks and sounds like them'. She added: '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.'
This is not the first time Williams has spoken out against AI recreations of her father, who died in 2014. In 2023, she supported the Screen Actors Guild’s campaign against AI, stating that she had 'witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad'. She described such recreations as 'a horrendous Frankensteinian monster'.
The Robin Williams deepfakes are part of a broader trend of AI-generated content, fuelled by free-to-use generative AI apps. Recent videos on TikTok appear to have been created using OpenAI’s Sora 2, including a fake ad for Apple and an awards ceremony interaction with Betty White. OpenAI has stated that content owners can flag copyright infringement, but individual artists cannot have a blanket opt-out.
