Zelda Williams says AI-generated videos of her late father Robin are ‘maddening’. Photo / Getty Images
Robin Williams’ daughter has pleaded with fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father and torturing him beyond the grave.
Zelda Williams wrote in a social media post on Monday: “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. it’s NOT what he’d want.”
Williams, one of America’s most beloved actors and comedians who starred in Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting, died by suicide in 2014, aged 63.
However, in 2025, his voice and face can be seen and heard all over video-sharing apps, like TikTok, where eerily lifelike recreations of deceased celebrities proliferate, racking up millions of views.
Elvis can be seen chatting to Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson sings about fried chicken and the physicist Steven Hawking competes in skateboarding competitions.
“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,” Williams, an actor and filmmaker, said.
“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 shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”
Ending her statement, she refused to refer to AI as “the future”, instead arguing it is “just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed”.
“You are taking in the Human Centipede of content,” Williams added, in reference to the infamous body horror film series.
Her comments come amid growing fears over hyper-realistic celebrity deepfakes being used on social media for anything from scams, pornography, political content and marketing campaigns.
In January, Scarlett Johansson warned of the “imminent dangers of AI” after a deepfake video of her and other Jewish celebrities, including Drake and Adam Sandler, speaking out against Kanye West for his anti-Semitic comments went viral.
The same month, a French woman was conned out of £630,000 ($1.4 million) after scammers used AI-generated images of Brad Pitt to convince her she was sending money to the actor.
As more sophisticated tools have been released to the public, AI-produced content is becoming ever more lifelike, sometimes indistinguishable from the real person.
There is also a raging debate between AI companies and creative professionals who are trying to stop their copyrighted work being used to train the complex algorithms used by the models.
Large language models, like ChatGPT, “learn” by scraping huge amounts of data from across the internet, meaning that much of the information they draw from is taken from the work of others.
Last week, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, unveiled its new video generation app, Sora 2, and the internet was quickly flooded with AI-generated videos of copyrighted characters from popular shows such as Pokémon, SpongeBob and South Park.
Following a swift backlash, the company said it would give copyright holders more control, the parameters of which were not clear. It also already bans the production of deepfakes of public figures, a rule that does not apply to dead celebrities.
In the UK, the Government is pushing to allow tech companies to use copyrighted material to train their AI models. However, the proposed legislation has faced strong opposition in the House of Lords, with peers calling for greater transparency.
It is not the first time Williams has spoken out against AI recreations of her father.
In 2023, during the Screen Actors Guild’s campaign against AI, she branded such iterations a “horrendous Frankensteinian monster” and a symptom of “the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for”.
“I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings,” she said.
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