Zelda Williams took to her Instagram story to call out people for using AI to recreate her father's likeness and then sending the videos to her, calling the depictions "gross."
WENN Rights Ltd / Alamy Stock PhotoZelda and Robin Williams holding hands at the premiere of World’s Greatest Dad in 2009.
Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, recently put out a message on her Instagram for fans who send her AI-generated videos of her father: “Stop.”
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” she wrote on her Instagram story.
“Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t,” Zelda stated. “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 dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.”
Zelda Williams Speaks Out About AI Recreations Of Her Dad
Bruce Glikas/Getty ImagesRobin Williams died on Aug. 11, 2014.
Robin Williams died in August 2014 of an apparent suicide at the age of 63. An autopsy later showed that he had Lewy body dementia, a debilitating brain disease, which had caused him to experience feelings of depression, anxiety, and paranoia in the months preceding his death.
Fans have mourned the actor and comedian in the decade since his passing, but in the wake of new AI tools funded by big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and the Elon Musk-backed xAI, some fans seem to have come to the conclusion that digital recreations of Williams’ voice and likeness are proper memorials to the late comedian.
Zelda previously spoke out against AI in 2023 while supporting an actors’ strike. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Zelda wrote on her Instagram story: “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.”
“These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but 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,” said Zelda.
Zelda Williams/InstagramDirector Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Robin Williams.
Williams, who directed the 2024 horror/comedy Lisa Frankenstein, made her stance clear: using AI does not equate to “making art.”
“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,” she wrote in her recent story. “Gross.”
Williams is hardly the only prominent voice to come out against the use of AI in the arts. In recent years, celebrity deepfakes and other AI creations have become an inescapable fixture of social media sites — some of which have been fairly convincing.
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RedditAn AI-generated image of Pope Francis that went viral in 2023.
Perhaps the earliest example of a somewhat convincing AI-generated image came in March 2023, when an image of Pope Francis wearing a large white puffer jacket circulated online. Since then, the algorithms used to train these models have only gotten better at deceiving users.
Even in the best-case scenarios, these videos present a disturbing truth: you no longer own your likeness or your voice. For public figures, the implications of this are terrifying. When OpenAI debuted its new voice models for ChatGPT in 2024, for example, people online were quick to point out that one model, Sky, sounded remarkably similar to actress Scarlett Johansson.
OpenAI claimed that the actress’ voice was not used to train its model, but a tweet from Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, that simply read “her” — an apparent reference to the 2013 film Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Johansson, in which a man falls in love with his AI companion — convinced many that the similarity was intentional. The company had also directly asked Johansson to provide her voice nine months earlier, which she declined.
“I have unfortunately been a very public victim of AI,” Johansson told People in 2025, “but the truth is that the threat of AI affects each and every one of us.”
The topic of unethical AI in Hollywood doesn’t just apply to recreations of real actors, either. Recently, an AI program called Tilly Norwood — billed by her programmers as an “AI actress” — has been making headlines as some revel in the idea of replacing human actors with synthetic ones.
Public DomainThe AI program dubbed Tilly Norwood.
SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin, of The Lord of the Rings and Stranger Things acclaim, addressed the program in a statement to Variety, saying his union “knows what this is and how to treat it.”
“With regard to AI, we have an extraordinary amount of leverage, because the audience wants to see real human performers in movies, TV shows, animation, video games, audio books and in all the other ways that we represent our members,” Astin said.
Even as Hollywood actors and directors push to keep AI out of films, this is what the ideal future looks like to some people. Zelda Williams, however, has a different outlook:
“And for the love of EVERY THING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed,” Zelda wrote in her recent post. “You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”
After reading about Zelda Williams’ stance on AI recreations of her father, read 25 Robin Williams quotes to help you remember the legend. Then, read about the life of Robin Williams’ widow, Susan Schneider.
