Filmmaker and actor Zelda Williams has spoken out after receiving AI-generated videos of her late father, Robin Williams. The “Lisa Frankenstein” director addressed the issue through an Instagram story. She criticized the use of artificial intelligence to recreate her father’s likeness.
Zelda Williams asks fans not to send her AI videos of her father Robin Williams
Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Robin Williams, asked fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her father. In an Instagram story, she wrote, “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t.” She added that such content is “dumb,” “a waste of time,” and “NOT what he’d want,” emphasizing that she finds these recreations deeply disrespectful.
Williams criticized the trend of AI recreations, saying, “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.” She described these videos as “disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings.”
The filmmaker and actor continued by addressing the broader cultural impact of artificial intelligence in art. “And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past,” she said. “You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line.”
This is not the first time Zelda Williams has condemned AI recreations of her father. In 2023, during the SAG-AFTRA strike, she described AI reproductions of deceased actors as “personally disturbing.” She stated, “I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad.” She further noted that such creations “are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster.”
