Zelda Williams, the daughter of acclaimed actor Robin Williams – who tragically died in 2014 at the age of 63 – has begged fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father.
The Lisa Frankenstein director wrote a lengthy message in her Instagram Story begging her father’s fans to respect his legacy.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda wrote. “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.”
The director then further condemned the AI-generative videos as slop worthy of being compared to “over-processed hot dogs.”
“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 said. “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.”
FLASHBACK: American film producer Marsha Garces Williams and her husband, American actor and comedian Robin Williams (1951-2014), carrying their daughter Zelda, outside the Cineplex Odeon Universal City Cinemas in Universal City, California, 17th March 1991. (Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images)
“And for the love of EVERY THING, 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,” she concluded.
According to Variety, Zelda Williams previously denounced AI recreations of her late father as “personally disturbing.”
“I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad. This isn’t theoretical, it is very very real,” wrote on Instagram in 2023 amid the SAG/WGA strikes.
“I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings,” she continued. “Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance. 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.”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube, Tubi, or Fawesome TV. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
