Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late Robin Williams, has launched a withering attack on the reams of AI-generated slop that's been generated featuring the actor's likeness. You can see why if you ever watch any of it. AI-generated video can barely manage a plausible normal human being for more than a few seconds, but a pun-packing livewire like Robin Williams, whose energy and humour shone out of his face like sunbeams? It's a joke, and not a good one.
"Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad," Zelda Williams wrote in an Instagram story. "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.
"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."
Robin Williams was understandably protective of his image and performances, most infamously in a spat with Disney over his role as the Genie in Aladdin. Accounts differ as to what exactly went down but Williams reportedly insisted that his voice wouldn't be used to shill merchandise: Disney broke the deal, selling toys that included his movie lines, and then-CEO Michael Eisner sent the actor a Picasso as an apology.
"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," says Zelda Williams. "Gross."
"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."
Williams' comments come shortly after the launch of OpenAI's Sora2, a video generation tool that can and has been used to generate AI versions of dead celebrities. I realise that this isn't helping things, but here's an example of the AI-generated content that sparked Zelda Williams' post: a seemingly chance encounter with Robin Williams on a park bench that may superficially hit some of the right notes but is at the same time completely off.
Robin Williams died in 2014 at the age of 63. He's not sitting on park benches answering questions about his career, nor is he starring in Apple adverts, or whatever other bizarre scenarios these ghouls come up with.
Celebrity deepfakes of one kind or another are, sadly, now just a fact of life. The rapid expansion of generative AI tools, fuelled by absolutely crazy investment figures, means that any bored dink can quickly 'create' a video starring whomever they want. As a test, I used Sora2 to generate various videos featuring celebrities and Nintendo characters, and it did them all without missing a beat. Copyright? Hahaha.
OpenAI, needless to say, brazens it out. The company says no individual artists or studios can opt-out of Sora 2, though in all its graciousness the company does offer a "copyright disputes form."
Zelda Williams has previously spoken out about AI impersonating dead actors, and points out that "the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings [...] These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for."
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