Robin Williams' daughter hates your deepfakes — and Hollywood's AI obsession

Zelda Williams, daughter of late actor Robin Williams and director of the 2024 cult favorite Lisa Frankenstein, has a single plea for people interacting with her online: Stop using her grief to peddle AI slop.

Williams, who has been an outspoken opponent to generative AI over recent years, made an impassioned plea to fans and trolls alike, begging in an Oct. 6 Instagram post to cease sharing AI-generated recreations of her late father in attempts to make her (and the parasocially attached public) feel better. Williams' own former costars have recently said they'd love to recreate him using the technology, adding to ongoing AI resurrection projects.

"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," wrote Williams. "It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he'd want."

The director continued, saying she believed that the use of generative AI at large was a failure in itself, a falsely-advertised tool of the future that really just reproduces content and churns out "horrible TikTok slop," like Human Centipede.

Using generative AI to recreate the likeness of deceased people raises issues of consent, during and after life. In response to the still unresolved issue of pervasive deepfakes, OpenAI updated restrictions for its new AI video generator app Sora 2, banning deepfakes of public figures — but only if they're still alive. It's not just a product of celebrity obsession either, with generative AI now integrating itself into legacy products advertised to grieving families and deepfakes appearing in interviews and court testimonies.

Media giants (including Ziff Davis, the owner of Mashable) have led a legal charge against AI firms for violating copyright laws and intellectual property rights, while tech companies have argued for the protection of fair use. In March, a group of 400 celebrities signed an open letter pleading with the White House to push back against AI's encroachment. Entertainment industry unions have spent years fighting for protections against the technology, one of the catalyzing factors of the historic 2023 strike conducted by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA).

Still, AI-enabled endeavors have escalated in recent months. An Amazon-backed AI firm announced it was trying to artificially recreate destroyed footage from director Orson Welles' 1942 project The Magnificent Ambersons. An AI-enhanced version of the Wizard of Oz, backed by Google, was projected inside of the Las Vegas Sphere, featuring extended scenes with digital backgrounds. Oscar-winning Titanic director James Cameron called generative AI the "most important" issue for current creatives, urging his peers to "master" and integrate the technology.

Hollywood is also now trying to sell the world on their next digital ingenue, a computer-generated actress that some online say looks awfully similar to some of the industry's current stars and the internet's faves. Her legal name (as in, that's what her IP is registered as) is Tilly Norwood, and she was created by Eline Van der Velden, founder of the AI production studio Particle6, and recently launched by AI talent studio Xicoia. At the time of the AI avatar's debut, Van der Velden claimed major studio agents were "circling" her artificial client, stoking outrage. "To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work — a piece of art," Van der Velden later argued.

Williams feels quite differently: "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," she wrote.