Actor Robin Williams (right) arrives with daughter Zelda (left) at Sony Pictures’ premiere of “R.V.” at the Mann Village Theatre on April 23, 2006 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images)
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Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams, has pushed back against fans sending her eerie AI-generated videos of her late father.
In a lengthy message posted on Instagram, Williams wrote, “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad … It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s not what he’d want.”
Williams’ post highlighted one of the most uncomfortable, ghoulish consequences of generative AI, and its ability to churn out photorealistic video—the emergence of digital necromancy.
Using the latest video generation models, AI users can reanimate the dead using photos and footage taken while the subjects were still alive, creating AI-doppelgangers that resemble the deceased, puppets that can spring into action with a prompt.
Robin Williams died by suicide on August 2014, at 63 years-old, long before the wave of AI-generated slop was unleashed on the internet.
Zelda Williams has previously voiced concern over generative AI in 2023, describing the technology as “a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is.”
What Did Zelda Williams Say About AI?
In her recent Instagram statement, Williams didn’t hold back in condemning the current generative AI trend, and the horror of seeing the likeness of a loved one reanimated.
“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,” her statement read.
“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.”
This isn’t the first time that generative AI has been used to create tasteless imagery and videos of deceased celebrities—Rod Stewart sparked backlash after playing a bizarre, AI-generated video of late musicians during a concert, the footage depicting the stars in Heaven, smiling and waving at the camera.
Fake footage of dead performers isn’t the only concern raised by generative AI—the technology recently ignited a wave of anger from Hollywood after an AI-generated “actress” designed to resemble a young woman was introduced as “the next Scarlet Johansson or Natalie Portman.”
In response, the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, stated that it is “opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”
On Instagram, Williams concluded her statement by dismissing those who would seek to push generative AI into the creative industries, writing:
“And for the love of everything, stop calling it ‘the future.’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. 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.”
Williams’ words echo those of the filmmaker Adam Curtis, who described generative AI as “the ghost of our time.”
Curtis was referring to the way that AI works, the models having been trained on countless works of the past, making their output inherently derivative.
AI takes the writing, imagery, music and video footage of previous generations and “mashes them up into this complex thing which then feeds itself back to us.”
Curtis goes on to describe our current cultural landscape as “haunted” and proposes that “AI is not the future. It’s the final end of the past.”
This macabre framing is becoming increasingly common when it comes to generative AI—even Sam Altman, of OpenAI, pointed out that evidence of the “Dead Internet Theory” could be seen on X (Twitter), with empty commentary from large language models creating the illusion of life.
The speed and ease in which one can generate a torrent of AI slop threatens to drown out the voices of real content creators.
Now the internet is seeing the consequences of AI’s ability to generate convincing footage of the living and dead, without their consent.
With AI, the dead speak, much to the horror of the living.