‘You’re not making art’: Robin Williams’ daughter begs fans to stop ‘disgusting’ AI recreations of her late father

Zelda Williams is once again making it absolutely clear: she does not want to see the AI-generated videos of her late father, Robin Williams, and she wants people to stop sending them to her. The daughter of the legendary actor and comedian recently took to her Instagram story to address the issue directly, telling fans, “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.”

This isn’t the first time Zelda has spoken out about these kinds of creations; she condemned AI versions of her father back in 2023 during the SAG-AFTRA strike, calling them “personally disturbing.” At that time, she urged people to give living actors a chance to work and stop stealing creative jobs. However, her latest comments go even further, expressing deep frustration not just with the technology, but also with the people sending these “gross” videos.

Zelda was blunt about her feelings, telling people to stop the practice “full stop.” She wrote, “If you’re just trying to troll me, I’ve seen way worse, I’ll restrict and move on. But please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop .” It’s her belief that these AI recreations are absolutely “NOT what he’d want.”

Stop pretending it’s okay to take celebrities’ likenesses and show them to their kids

Zelda then went on to describe the practice as exploitative and “maddening”. The filmmaker said that watching the legacies of real people get “condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’” is simply to allow “other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them.” She was incredibly clear that in her eyes, this isn’t artistic creation at all, it’s just a way to make content off of her wealthy dad.

“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 ,” she wrote. It’s a powerful metaphor for what many view as the soulless, automated nature of this kind of content, and does not represent the goodness Williams had.

Zelda also rejected the idea that these AI recreations represent any kind of genuine progress. She said, “And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future’ .” In her view, the technology is just “badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed .” She compared consuming the content to “the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line,” while the people behind it “laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”

Her ongoing criticism highlights a significant problem in the entertainment industry right now. During the SAG-AFTRA strikes, she pointed out that she had “witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad .” She stressed that this is a “very very real” issue that goes beyond her personal feelings, as it affects the dignity of the deceased and the employment opportunities of living performers.

For Zelda, the recreations fail on a fundamental level. “Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance ,” she argued. Ultimately, she believes these AI efforts are, “at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster.”