Robin Williams’ daughter has pleaded with fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of the late actor, saying it is something he would have hated.
Zelda Williams, who recently made her directorial debut with Lisa Frankenstein, took to Instagram to condemn the growing trend of digitally recreating her father’s image and voice.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories on Monday. “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. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he'd want.”
Williams, star of Mrs Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society, died by suicide in 2014 aged 63 after being misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His autopsy revealed he had Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disorder.
Zelda, 35, said watching “the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’” for online content was “maddening”.
“You’re not making art,” she added. “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 thumbs up and like it. Gross.”
She went on to reject the idea that artificial intelligence represents “the future”, writing: “AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past... You are taking in the Human Centipede of content.”
Her comments come after Mrs Doubtfire co-star Matthew Lawrence said earlier this year that he would “love” to recreate Williams’s voice using AI, but only with the family’s approval.
“With the respect and with the OK from Robin’s family, I’d love to do something really special,” Lawrence told Entertainment Weekly at Comic-Con earlier this year. “That voice is so iconic – it’s in everybody’s head.”
It’s not the first time Zelda has spoken out about the use of AI in Hollywood. During the 2023 actors’ strike, she said she had already seen people use technology to make her father’s voice “say whatever people want”.
She warned such recreations were “a poor facsimile of greater people” and at worst “a horrendous Frankensteinian monster”.
Her remarks follow the rise of AI-generated clips featuring deceased stars including Michael Jackson and Betty White, as social media fills with synthetic celebrity “performances”.
