Zelda Williams Eviscerates A.I. Graverobbers ‘Puppeteering’ Her Late Father’s Image
Just when you thought humanity couldn’t possibly get any worse, apparently people won’t stop sending A.I.-generated garbage videos featuring Robin Williams’ likeness to the late star’s daughter, Zelda.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda wrote in a recent Instagram Story, per Variety. “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,” 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.”
Don't Miss
“And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’” she concluded. “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.”
Comparing A.I.-generated “art” to “over-processed hotdogs” and “the Human Centipede of content” is a pretty inspired takedown of Big Tech’s creatively-impotent slop factory, but it is genuinely dispiriting that this conversation even has to be had. As we’ve mentioned before, Zelda Williams has already publicly stated her opposition to A.I. clones of her dad’s voice, calling it “personally disturbing.” Now she’s having to contend with videos, too?
While Zelda didn’t specify the source of these videos, the timing seems to coincide with the release of OpenAI’s Sora 2, which recently made headlines for allowing users to create legally-dubious South Park videos. Sora 2 has an “explicit ban on creating AI-generated videos of public figures,” but weirdly, that “policy doesn’t apply to dead celebrities,” hence why users have been able to create videos starring Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur and Bob “Happy Little Trees” Ross.
And while it should go without saying that no one should be reanimating dead people and sending these inherently ghoulish videos to their loved ones, it’s especially egregious in the case of Robin Williams, considering that the Mrs. Doubtfire star “put in place a restriction on his image, or any likeness of his image, being used for 25 years after his death” thus restricting “any posthumous exploitation of the actor’s image.”
And it’s not like Williams didn’t leave behind a vast body of work for future generations to enjoy. Why not just kick back and rewatch The Fisher King instead of depleting the world’s water supply just to get 30 seconds of Robin Williams Live From the Uncanny Valley?
