Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams and the director of 2024 horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein, has issued a firm ultimatum for fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos featuring her father.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” wrote Williams in a message posted via Instagram. “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.”
Willams is adamant in her disgust for AI-generated content and the culture around it.
“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,” her statement explained. “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.”
“And for the love of everything, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. 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.”
Williams’ new comments echo concerns she raised previously in 2023 about the use of AI to emulate the voices of actors who cannot consent to it.
“I’ve witnessed for years how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad,” she wrote at the time. “This isn’t theoretical, it is very, very real.”
Williams’ comments came in support of the Screen Actors Guild’s (SAG) fight against AI.
Robin Williams died in August 2014. The Academy Award-winning actor and comedy icon was 63.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
