Robin Williams’ Daughter Calls Late Actor’s AI Videos ‘Disgusting’ Amid Generative AI Wild West

Zelda Williams – actress, director and daughter of the late actor Robin Williams – has spoken out on Instagram about what she calls the “disgusting” AI recreations of her father.

“Please stop sending me AI videos of dad. Stop assuming I want to see it or that I will 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 who tried to upset her, before appealing to others.

“Please, if you have any decency, stop doing this to him and me – even to everyone, period. It’s stupid, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s not what he would want.”

Robin Williams committed suicide in 2014 at the age of 63. An autopsy report revealed that he suffered from Lewy body dementia.

“Seeing real people’s legacy condensed into something that vaguely resembles them, so that’s enough,” just so other people can produce horrible TikTok slops by manipulating them is infuriating,” Zelda Williams wrote in the post.

“You’re not making art. You’re making disgusting, over-processed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings – out of the history of art and music – and then you feed them to someone else, hoping they’ll give you a little push and like it. Disgusting.”

Williams’ statements about her father this week echo those she made in 2023, when US acting union SAG-AFTRA publicly declared AI a “mandatory bargaining subject” to end its strike action.

Zelda then said that she had seen many AI-created recreations of her father, call them “personally disturbing” and an artistic violation that went “far beyond (his) own feelings.”

WATCH | Can you protect your own identity through copyright? :

Can you copyright your digital identity?

For The National, CBC’s Ashley Fraser explains how Denmark is trying to reshape digital identity protection and how Canada’s laws compare.

AI models

The idea of ​​digital recreations of real people has been a topic of debate for years, entering broader pop culture as early as the infamous deepfake video of former US President Barack Obama in 2018then the promise of a James Dean digitally resurrected in a 2019 film. But after the generative AI boom took off in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, it quickly became a existential question for many artistic industries.

The arts world is grappling with a AI-assisted text wins literary prizethe introduction and an apparent bust NFTs and the creation of AI-created songs – either recreate the voices of established artists or using fully synthetic artists.

In Hollywood, the question of whether and to what extent AI tools will shape the cinematic landscape has seeped into nearly every aspect of the industry. In preliminary versions available to the public Among the contracts signed by SAG-AFTRA to end their strike, the union and movie studios agreed to “recognize the importance of human performance in filmmaking” and act in “good faith” toward each other in negotiations.

This somewhat vague and difficult-to-enforce agreement has since sparked controversy: notably with the introduction of “synthetic performer” Tilly Norwood, an AI “actress” created by AI production company Particle6.

Although the AI ​​model only appeared in a brief video titled “AI Commissioner“This provoked almost immediate backlash. In response, SAG-AFTRA said in a statement that it ‘believes that creativity is and should remain human-centered.’ The union opposes the replacement of human artists with synthetics.”

Similarly, the UK’s acting union, Equity, said that “this tool is made up of the work of artists and we are concerned about where this work comes from and whether it has received consent to be used in this way.”

The Canadian actors’ union, ACTRA, said Norwood was “nothing but lines of code” wrongly constructed from the work of real actors.

WATCH | Hollywood reacts to synthetic artist Tilly Norwood:

AI-generated ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood sparks Hollywood reaction

European AI production company Particle6 says its AI creation Tilly Norwood has generated a lot of interest, but Hollywood actors including Emily Blunt, Melissa Barrera and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as the SAG-AFTRA union, have spoken out against the AI ​​character.

While the debate between unions and studios plays out on one front, Zelda Williams’ comments reflect another: the use of AI by the average citizen through publicly available generative AI programs. These videos have seen a serious increase since ChatGPT creator OpenAI released its text-to-video AI model, Sora 2, last week.

This generative AI system promised more realistic and controllable results for users than the first iteration of the program, but almost immediately drew the ire of copyright holders.

Sora 2 launched simultaneously with the Sora app, a sort of social media platform made up of AI-generated videos and currently available by invitation only in the United States and Canada. Within 24 hours of its launch, Washington Post tech journalists found it full of fake videos and able to create ones showing “real people dressed as Nazi generals, very convincing bogus scenes from TV shows, including South Park and fake images of historical figures such as John F. Kennedy.

Fake video showed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman grilling and eating the fictional Pokémon character Pikachu. According to CNBCanother showed Altman, in a field of Pokémon, saying “I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us.”

OpenAI has since declared they will give copyright holders “finer control” over which characters can be used in the app. Nintendo, which owns the intellectual rights to Pokémon, released its own statement, saying that “whether generative AI is involved or not, we will continue to take necessary action against infringement of our intellectual property rights.”

Legal proceedings

Elsewhere, Disney and Universal filed lawsuits 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, accusing them of “blatantly violating” Disney’s copyrights by using their characters. Character.AI said it removed these characters in response.

Other industry players have already spoken about generative AI. During a recent appearance on the podcast Conan O’Brien needs a friend, Filmmaker Werner Herzog called short films AI “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 is creating this thing has no idea what pain is. I am completely disgusted…. I strongly believe it is an insult to life itself.”