NEED TO KNOW
- Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda asked her father’s fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father, in two Instagram Stories posts on Oct. 6
- “If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop,” she wrote
- In October 2023, Zelda said she found the AI use of her father’s voice “personally disturbing”
Zelda Williams is asking fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father, Robin Williams, 11 years after his death.
In a strongly-worded message to fans on her Instagram Stories on Monday, Oct. 6, the 36-year-old filmmaker asked that they “stop believing” that she wants to see these videos, or “that [she’ll] understand.”
“I don’t and I won’t,” she wrote. “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.”
She went on to call it a “waste of time and energy,” adding, “And believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
Zelda went on to denounce a growing trend on social media, where people use AI-generators to create videos of deceased celebrities, her father included.
“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 splo puppeteering them is maddening,” the Lisa Frankenstein director wrote.
She described the videos as “disgusting, over-processed hotdogs” that are being shoved down social media users’ throats, “hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”
Artificial intelligence is “badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be consumed,” Zelda wrote in a second Instagram Story post. “You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”
Zelda previously spoke out against the use of her father’s voice for AI in October 2023, when recreating a person’s image or voice without their approval was one of the top concerns during the SAG-AFTRA strike.
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI,” Zelda wrote at the time. “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.”
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She went on to call it “personally disturbing” to hear AI tools use her father’s voice and noted how there are ramifications that go “far beyond my own feelings.”
“Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance,” Zelda wrote.
Robin, who lent his voice to popular animated characters in Aladdin, Robots and Happy Feet, died in Augst 2014 at 63. He was also survived by his sons Zachary “Zak” Williams and Cody Alan Williams, and his widow, Susan Schneider.
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