Zelda Williams, daughter of late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has spoken out against AI-generated content featuring her father, telling the public to stop sending her such videos.
Williams made the plea in an Instagram story on Monday, reports The Guardian.
“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.”
Williams, an actor and film-maker who directed 2024 horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein, criticised those creating the videos, saying they were condensing the legacies of real people to produce content.
“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,” she wrote.
Williams also rejected descriptions of AI as the future, calling it badly recycled content from the past.
This is not the first time Williams has called out AI recreations of her father, who died in 2014 aged 63. In 2023, she wrote that she had witnessed for years how many people want to train AI models to recreate actors who cannot consent.
The post comes as celebrity deepfakes continue to proliferate across social media. Several recent TikTok videos of Robin Williams appear to have been created using OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generator app, including a fake Apple advert.
