“Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t,” Zelda Williams wrote.
LOS ANGELES — Zelda Williams is asking social media users to refrain from sending her AI-generated videos of her late father, comedian Robin Williams, over a decade after his passing.
Through a series of Instagram Stories shared on Monday, the 36-year-old filmmaker expressed a firm request for people to stop creating and distributing these artificial intelligence videos of her father.
“Stop assuming that I want to see it or that I can comprehend it—I don’t and won’t,” Williams wrote. “If your intention is to troll me, I’ve experienced much worse; I’ll simply restrict and move on. But please, if you have any sense of decency, quit subjecting him, me, and everyone else to this, entirely.”
Williams called the videos a “waste of time and energy,” adding that creating such content is “NOT what he’d want.”
The director, known for her work on “Lisa Frankenstein,” took her critique beyond the videos of her father, addressing a wider trend of AI-generated content featuring deceased celebrities that has surged on social media recently.
“You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings,” Williams wrote in a subsequent post.
She likened artificial intelligence to “poorly recycling and regurgitating the past for consumption,” comparing it to receiving content from the end of a human centipede while those benefiting from it “chuckle and indulge endlessly.”
Williams has previously expressed her opposition to AI recreations of her father. In October 2023, during the SAG-AFTRA strike, she raised concerns about the technology when the use of actors’ digital likenesses became a significant issue in negotiations.
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI,” Williams wrote at the time. “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.”
Williams described watching AI tools recreate her father’s voice as “personally disturbing” and said the issue extends “far beyond my own feelings.”
“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,” she wrote.
Robin Williams, a prolific comedian and actor, died in August 2014 at age 63. He is survived by his daughter Zelda and sons Zachary “Zak” Williams and Cody Alan Williams, as well as his widow, Susan Schneider.
