Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, has voiced her opposition to AI-generated content featuring her father.
“Please, stop sending videos of dad generated by AI,” Zelda posted on my Instagram story on Monday. “Stop assuming that I want to see it or that I’m interested; I don’t, I really don’t. If you’re just trying to annoy me, I encounter something worse, I block it and move on.”
“To reduce the legacy of real individuals to something like, ‘Just this vague appearance and sound, that’s sufficient,’ is disheartening.”
“You’re not creating art; you’re producing grotesque, over-processed versions of human life, derived from art and musical history.”
“And for heaven’s sake, stop referring to it as the ‘future’; AI is merely a mishmash of recycled content that badly reflects the past. It’s integrating superficial human content.”
This isn’t the first instance where Zelda Williams, an actor and filmmaker who directed the 2024 horror-comedy Lisa Frankenstein, has addressed the recreation of her father, who passed away at 63 in 2014. The potential for realism is concerning.
“I’ve encountered AI imitating his ‘voice’ and saying what people want to hear. While I find this intrusive personally, the implications extend far beyond my own sentiments.”
“These recreations are inferior imitations of great individuals and, at their worst, resemble horrifying Frankenstein-like constructs formed from the industry’s lowest points.”
Zelda’s recent commentary arrives amidst a surge of celebrity deepfakes on social media, which span various themes, including adult content, political messages, scams, and advertisements.
In January, actress Scarlett Johansson highlighted the “immediate dangers of AI” following her condemnation of Kanye West’s anti-Semitic comments, after deepfake videos surfaced featuring other prominent Jewish celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld, Drake, and Adam Sandler.
A fraudulent advertisement featuring Deepfark in August was falsely attributed to Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, who stated he was incorrectly represented discussing erectile dysfunction, prompting the band to issue a disclaimer.
The deepfakes of Robin Williams are part of a larger trend in AI-generated content, fueled by the rapid proliferation of low-quality material produced by entertainment-free generation AI applications.
The recent TikTok video featuring Robin Williams appears to have been created using Sora 2, OpenAI’s new video generation app, and includes a simulated interaction between the comedian and the late Betty White.
Within days of launch, Sora’s feed was inundated with videos featuring copyrighted characters from series like SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, Pokémon, and Rick and Morty.
OpenAI informed the Guardian that content owners can report copyright violations through a “copyright dispute form,” although individual artists and studios cannot opt out broadly. Varun Shetty, Head of Media Partnerships at OpenAI, commented:
Source: www.theguardian.com
