Zelda Williams, the 36-year-old daughter of the Oscar-winning actor and one of the greatest comedians of all time, Robin Williams, issued a strongly worded rebuke to people creating and sending her AI-generated videos of her late father, who died by suicide in August 2014. It was later discovered Williams was quietly suffering from Lewy body dementia. He was 63.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Williams wrote on Instagram on Monday. “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,” she said. “It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
The timing of Williams’ post is not a coincidence: OpenAI this week released its Sora 2 video-generation tool on an invite-only basis, but despite the small number of people who have access to the service, social networks are already getting flooded with deepfakes of dead celebrities. OpenAI prohibits the creation of living public figures without consent, but the company told PCMag it allows for the generation of “historical figures,” which is somewhat of a loophole. One search through any social network like Meta’s Threads or Elon Musk’s X and you’ll find videos of the late rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. wrestling in a cage match, or the late zookeeper and conservationist Steve Irwin tackling the stingray that killed him.
