Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams and director of the romantic comedy Lisa Frankenstein, recently pleaded with Instagram Stories to stop sending out videos generated by her father, the iconic comedian who passed away in 2014 at the age of 63.
“Please stop sending dad’s AI videos,” Zelda wrote. “Stop believing you want to see or understand, I don’t know and don’t think so. If you’re just trying to troll me, I’ve seen things worse. I’ll limit and move on. But if you have good sense, stop this completely, stop it, stop it completely. It’s ridiculous, it’s a waste of time and energy, and trust me, that’s not what he wants.
“It’s infuriating to see real people’s legacy condenses into the point of ‘I look and voice and sound somehow resemble them, so that’s enough’, and see others wield them puppets and produce a bunch of terrible TikTok slops,” she continued. “You’re not making art. You’re making a disgustingly over-processed hot dog from human life, art and music history, and you’re hoping that you’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. It’s disgusting.”
Zelda concluded: “And stop calling it the ‘future’ in order to love everything. AI is just recycling and vomiting the past so badly to be reconsumed. You’re taking centipede-human content from the back of the line, while those on the frontline laugh, consume and consume.”
These latest Instagram Story posts aren’t the first time Zelda has denounced AI reenactment of her late father. When SAG-AFTRA cited AI recreation as the “essential negotiable subject” for the strike in 2023, Zelda bashing Robin Williams’ AI version as “personally offensive.”
“I am not a fair speaker in the SAG fight against AI,” Zelda wrote on Instagram at the time. “I have witnessed over the years how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors like Dad. This is not theoretical, it’s very realistic.”
“I’ve heard that AI was communicating anything people wanted through a ‘voice’. Personally, I find it uncomfortable, but the impact is far beyond my own feelings,” she continued. “Living actors should be given the chance to create characters of their choice, voice cartoons, and spend human effort and time in pursuit of acting. These reenactments are poor replicas of great people, at best, but at worst, they are not something the industry should represent, but the horrifying Frankenstein monsters that combine all the worst parts of this industry.”
Read Zelda’s latest post in the photo below.
