Robin Williams’ Daughter Condemns Sora 2 AI Videos of Her Late Father
Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has condemned the use of artificial intelligence to create digital recreations of her father.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” she wrote on an Instagram story 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. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
Many AI-generated clips of Robin Williams are circulating on TikTok and appear to have been made with OpenAI’s video tool Sora 2, including fabricated ads and fake awards show interactions.
Zelda — an actor and filmmaker who directed the 2024 horror-comedy Lisa Frankenstein — has spoken out before against AI recreations of her father, who died in 2014 at age 63. In 2023, she voiced support for the Screen Actors Guild’s campaign against AI, writing that she had “witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad.”
“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 wrote at the time. “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.”
Her recent comments echoed her previous sentiments. “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 continued this week.
“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. And for the love of EVERYTHING, 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.”
Over the weekend, OpenAI backtracked on copyright policy for Sora 2. CEO Sam Altman wrote that he will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how characters appear. But it isn’t clear how this will work for well-known deceased celebrities like Williams. There has also been an avalanche of videos showing Michael Jackson and Stephen Hawking.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
