Zelda Williams Calls AI Recreations Of Her Father ‘Disturbing’

Zelda Williams, daughter of the renowned actor Robin Williams, posted a statement about AI replications to her Instagram story on Sunday.

Robin has long been an actor others do their best to imitate, and are rarely successful. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have created immense potential for various applications, both beneficial and detrimental. A central concern is the unauthorized recreation of an individual’s image or voice using AI technology. This has become an issue at the forefront of the current actor’s strike. 

Williams wrote in her story, “I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI…I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad. This isn’t theoretical, it is very very real.”

Robin, known for his improvisational skills and characterizations, was an Oscar-winner and comedian who died by suicide in 2014.

Williams continued in her statement, “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… 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.”

SAG-AFTRA has demanded that AI recreations of any actor’s image, voice, or likeness be “a mandatory subject of bargaining,” in the current actor’s strike.

The creative use of AI is currently a central topic of conversation across Hollywood. Many actors have warned their fans of AI videos of themselves that they did not sign off on. Filmmaker and animator Tim Burton compared AI recreations to “a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”

Williams finished, “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.”

The writers’ strike was recently able to come to an agreement that AI cannot be used to write or rewrite material. It is up to the writer whether they want to employ AI in their process, but studios are not allowed to use a writer’s work to train AI without the writer’s permission.