Zelda Williams has called computer-generated recreations of her deceased father “disgusting”
Filmmaker Zelda Williams has condemned the continued circulation of AI-generated videos of her father, the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, in a strongly worded post shared on Instagram.
Robin Williams, known for his roles in ‘Dead Poets Society’, ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, and ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’, died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 63. His wife later revealed he had unknowingly been battling Lewy body dementia, which may have contributed to his depression at the time of his death.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda wrote on Tuesday. “Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t.”
“If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop.”
In her latest statement, she expressed deep frustration with the trend of digitally reviving deceased individuals for online content. “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 wrote.
“You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings… Gross,” she added.
Williams described AI-generated videos as a process that mindlessly reuses and reprocesses the past for consumption. She likened it to being at the end of a grotesque production line, endlessly fed recycled content while those who started it profit and indulge without consequence.
Zelda has previously criticized the use of artificial intelligence to replicate her father’s voice and image. In 2023, she called such recreations “personally disturbing” while supporting a campaign by the labor union of media professionals and actors against the use of AI in entertainment.
