Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has voiced strong opposition to the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create videos featuring her deceased father.
In a post on Instagram, Zelda pleaded with fans and content creators to stop sending her AI-generated clips of Robin Williams. She wrote: “Please stop sending me videos of my dad created with AI. It’s disrespectful, it’s a waste of time, and it’s not what he would have wanted. Stop this for the sake of him, for me, and for everyone.”
Zelda criticized the trend of turning real people’s legacies into “puppets” for social media, describing AI-generated content as “disgusting, overprocessed hot dogs of people’s lives,” made for mere likes. She added that AI “is not the future; it just recycles the past.”
This is not Zelda Williams’ first public objection to AI recreations of her father, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 63. In 2023, she highlighted the risks of training AI models to reproduce actors without their consent, pointing out that such representations can be a “poor imitation of great people” or even “a Frankenstein monster” of their work.
The concern around celebrity deepfakes has grown alongside the rapid adoption of AI apps, which allow users to generate videos with famous figures. Recent examples include manipulated videos of Scarlett Johansson, Neil Finn from Crowded House, and other high-profile personalities. Many of these clips appear on platforms like TikTok, often using AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora 2.
Zelda Williams’ comments come amid broader debates on AI ethics, consent, and intellectual property. While OpenAI has stated that copyright holders can flag content for removal, there is currently no way for individual artists to prevent general AI use of their likenesses.
As deepfake technology becomes increasingly accessible, the conversation around respecting the memory and legacy of public figures like Robin Williams continues to intensify.
