Actor-director Zelda Williams, daughter of Hollywood icon Robin Williams, on Monday urged people to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father, calling them “gross”.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories.
“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,” she added.
Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams died at the age of 63 on August 11, 2014 at his home in Tiburon, Calif. in Marin County. Toxicology reports revealed antidepressants, caffeine and levodopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease, in his system. His death was ruled a suicide caused by asphyxia and hanging, which he committed after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
“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 Zelda.
The Lisa Frankenstein director further pointed out that those sharing such videos with her are not “making art”. Instead, they are 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.”
It’s “gross”, Zelda added. She signed off by saying, “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.”
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This is not the first time Zelda has criticised AI-generated versions of her late father. Back in 2023, when the SAG-AFTRA listed artificial intelligence recreations as a “mandatory subject of bargaining”, in its strike, Zelda called AI-generated versions of her late father “personally disturbing”.
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI,” Zelda had written on Instagram. “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,” she added.
Zelda has always been vocal about her distaste for AI-created content. Earlier this year, she slammed the Ghibli trend on social media platforms, pointing out the dangers of AI and Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki’s disapproval for machine-made animation.