Zelda Williams, the accomplished director and daughter of the late comedic legend Robin Williams, has once again voiced her profound disapproval of AI-generated content featuring her father. In a recent Instagram story, Williams pleaded with the public to cease sending her AI videos of Robin Williams, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 63. She emphasized her lack of desire to see or understand such content, stating, “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad.”

Williams articulated her strong conviction that such AI recreations are not what her father would have wanted, labeling them as “dumb” and “a waste of time and energy.” She passionately critiqued the nature of these digital fabrications, asserting that they condense the legacies of real people into vague likenesses to facilitate the creation of “horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them.” Her disdain was palpable as she described the process as akin to “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.”

Furthermore, Zelda Williams dismissed the notion of AI as “the future,” arguing instead that “AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed.” She metaphorically likened consuming such content to partaking in “the Human Centipede of content,” suggesting a grotesque and exploitative cycle where creators at the front profit while others consume degraded versions of human experience.

This recent plea is not an isolated incident. In 2023, during the SAG-AFTRA strike, when AI recreations were designated a “mandatory subject of bargaining,” Zelda Williams publicly denounced AI versions of Robin Williams as “personally disturbing.” At that time, she declared her non-impartial stance in SAG’s fight against AI, revealing that for years she had witnessed desires to train AI models to create or recreate actors who could not give consent, like her father. She clarified that this was not a theoretical issue but a very real one, having already encountered AI being used to make his “voice” say whatever people desired.

Williams highlighted the far-reaching ramifications beyond her personal feelings, stressing the importance of living actors having the opportunity to create characters with their own choices, voice cartoons, and invest their human effort and time into performance. She concluded by describing these AI recreations, at their best, as “a poor facsimile of greater people,” and 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 consistent and fervent objections underscore a deep concern for the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in entertainment and the preservation of human legacy and artistry.