Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda, an actor and director in her own right, has done an incredible job of guarding her father’s legacy. And that legacy is under a different kind of attack these days. She called AI recreations of his voice a “Frankenstein monster” a couple years ago — and she should know, as she directed “Lisa Frankenstein.” Now, Williams has taken to Instagram to protest the AI video recreations of her father that she’s received in recent vintage. Whatever the intent of the people sending them to her, Williams isn’t having it.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Williams wrote in a post on Instagram Stories. “Stop believing that I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. 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.”
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“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. 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.”
“And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future.’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. 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.”
It’s interesting how much the use of generative AI is an artistic rubicon. Williams himself was a trailblazer when it came to different media, arguably creating the entire decades-long trend of A-list celebrities voicing characters in animated films with his role as the Genie in Disney’s “Aladdin.” An avid gamer, he even named his daughter after the “Legend of Zelda” series.
But it’s hard to think of the use of AI in this context as anything but as direly derivative as Williams says. It’s like the obvious and lazy video parodies of a director’s style, such as Wes Anderson’s, now actually no longer even made by a human.
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