Zelda Williams condemns AI videos of her father, Robin Williams: “It’s NOT what he’d want”
Zelda Williams has condemned the online circulation of AI-generated videos of her father, Robin Williams, saying: “It’s NOT what he’d want.”
Ever since AI-generated videos started having a foothold on social media, especially those that use the likenesses of people who have passed away to figuratively bring them back to life, Williams has become a particularly common subject since he died in 2014 at the age of 63.
However, his daughter has now made clear in a lengthy Instagram Stories post, shared on October 6th, that she does not approve of the practice.
She wrote: “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. 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.”
Williams added: “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.”
The filmmaker noted that the process of creating AI videos for the purpose of online content was like “making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings” before “shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it,” which she branded as “gross”.
This is not the first time that Williams has spoken out against the use of AI regarding her father, as in 2023 she shared a post on Instagram during the writers’ strike campaign against the technology, saying it was something she had “witnessed for years”.
However, it comes after Mrs Doubtfire star Matthew Lawrence said in July this year that he would “love” to use the actor’s voice in an AI capacity. In light of Williams’ most recent comments, it seems unlikely that Lawrence would receive the approval of his family to do so.
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