Daughter of Robin Williams calls AI videos of late actor 'disgusting' amid generative AI Wild West
Zelda Williams — actress, director and daughter to the late actor Robin Williams — has spoken out on Instagram about what she calls "disgusting" AI recreations of her father.
"Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't," she posted in an Instagram story that has since expired. She said she would simply ban those trying to upset her, before making a plea to others.
"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."
Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 63. An autopsy report found he had Lewy body dementia.
"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," Zelda Williams wrote in the post.
"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."
Williams's statements about her father this week echo ones she made back in 2023, when American acting union SAG-AFTRA publicly stated AI was "a mandatory subject of bargaining" in ending its strike action.
Zelda said then she had seen numerous AI-made recreations of her dad, calling them "personally disturbing" and an artistic violation that went "far beyond [her] own feelings."
The idea of digital recreations of real people has been a subject of debate for years, breaking into wider pop culture as far back as an infamous deepfake video of former U.S. president Barack Obama in 2018, and then the promise of a digitally resurrected James Dean starring in a film in 2019. But after the generative AI boom took off in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, it has quickly become an existential issue for numerous arts industries.
The arts world has grappled with an AI-assisted text winning a literary award, the introduction and seeming bust of NFTs, and the crafting of AI-created songs — either recreating established artists' voices or using fully synthetic performers.
In Hollywood, whether and how much AI tools will come to shape the movie landscape has seeped into almost every aspect of the industry. In publicly available draft versions of the contracts SAG-AFTRA signed to end their strike, the union and movie studios agreed to "acknowledge the importance of human performance in motion pictures" and to act in "good faith" toward one another in bargaining.
That somewhat fuzzy, hard-to-enforce agreement has since led to controversy: including in the introduction of "synthetic performer" Tilly Norwood, an AI "actress" created by AI production company Particle6.
Though the AI model has only appeared in one brief video called "AI Commissioner,"it led to almost immediate backlash. In response, SAG-AFTRA said in a statement that it "believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics."
Similarly, the United Kingdom's acting union Equity stated "that tool is made up of performers' work and we are concerned about where that work has come from, and if that's been given consent to be used in that way."
The Canadian actors union, ACTRA, said Norwood was "nothing but lines of code" that was wrongfully built from actual actors' work.
As the debate between unions and studios plays out on one front, Zelda Williams's comments reflect another: the use of AI by average people through publicly available generative AI programs. Such videos have seen a serious uptick since ChatGPT-creator OpenAI released their text-to-video AI model, Sora 2, last week.
That generative AI system promised more realistic and more controllable results for users than the program's first iteration, but almost immediately drew the ire of copyright holders.
Sora 2 was launched simultaneously with the Sora app, a kind of social media platform made of AI-generated videos and currently only available by invite in the United States and Canada. Within 24 hours of its launch, Washington Post tech reporters found it full of fake videos and capable of creating ones showing "real people dressed as Nazi generals, highly convincing phony scenes from TV shows including South Park and fake footage of historical figures such as John F. Kennedy."
One fake video showed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman grilling and eating the fictional Pokemon character Pikachu. According to CNBC, another showed Altman, in a field of Pokemon, saying "I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us."
OpenAI has since stated they will give copyright holders "more granular control" over which characters can be used in the app. Nintendo, which owns the intellectual rights to Pokemon, issued a statement of its own, saying "whether generative AI is involved or not, we will continue to take necessary actions against infringement of our intellectual property rights."
Legal proceedingsElsewhere, Disney and Universal started legal proceedings against AI image generator Midjourney earlier this year for alleged use of their copyrighted material. Disney also recently sent a cease and desist letter to AI chatbot platform Character.AI, charging that they were "blatantly infringing" Disney copyrights by using their characters. Character.AI said they removed those characters in response.
Others in the industry have previously spoken out about generative AI. In a recent appearance on the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, filmmaker Werner Herzog called AI short films "completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul. They are empty and soulless."
And Hayao Miyazaki, head of animation company Studio Ghibli, had harsh words for AI animation in a 2016 documentary.
When shown an AI-generated animation, he said: "Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted…. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."
cbc.ca
