Zelda Williams \u2014 actress, director and daughter to the late actor Robin Williams \u2014 has spoken out on Instagram about what she calls “disgusting” AI recreations of her father.<\/p>\n
“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,” she posted in an Instagram story that has since expired.\u00a0She said she would simply ban those trying to upset her, before making\u00a0a plea to others.<\/p>\n
“Please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n
Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 63<\/a>. An autopsy report found he had Lewy body dementia.<\/p>\n “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,” Zelda Williams\u00a0wrote in the post.<\/p>\n “You’re not making art. You’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings \u2014 out of the history of art and music \u2014 and then shoving them down someone else’s throat, hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”<\/p>\n Williams’s statements about her father this week echo ones she made back in 2023, when American\u00a0acting union SAG-AFTRA publicly stated AI was “a mandatory subject of bargaining” in ending its strike action.\u00a0<\/p>\n Zelda said then\u00a0she had seen numerous AI-made recreations of her dad,\u00a0calling\u00a0the<\/u><\/a>m\u00a0“personally disturbing”<\/a> and an artistic violation that went “far beyond [her] own feelings.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Can you copyright your digital identity?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For The National, CBC\u2019s Ashley Fraser breaks down how Denmark is trying to reshape digital identity protection and how Canada\u2019s laws compare.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n The idea of digital recreations of real people has been a subject of debate for years, breaking into wider pop culture as far back as an infamous deepfake\u00a0video of former U.S. president Barack Obama in 2018<\/u><\/a>, and then the promise of a digitally resurrected James Dean starring in a film in 2019<\/u><\/a>. But after the generative AI boom took off in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, it has quickly become an existential issue for<\/u> numerous arts industries<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n The arts\u00a0world has grappled with an AI-assisted text winning a literary\u00a0award<\/u><\/a>, the introduction and seeming bust<\/u><\/a> of NFTs, and the crafting of\u00a0AI-created songs \u2014 either recreating established artists’ voices<\/u><\/a>\u00a0or using\u00a0fully synthetic performers<\/u><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Hollywood, whether and how much\u00a0AI tools will come to shape the movie landscape has seeped into almost every aspect of the industry. In publicly available draft versions<\/u><\/a> of the contracts SAG-AFTRA signed to end their strike, the union and movie studios agreed to “acknowledge the importance of human performance in motion pictures” and to act in “good faith” toward one another in bargaining.<\/p>\n That somewhat fuzzy, hard-to-enforce agreement has since led to controversy: including in the introduction of “synthetic performer” Tilly Norwood, an AI “actress” created by AI production company Particle6.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though the AI model has only appeared in one brief video called “AI Commissioner<\/u><\/a>,”it led to almost immediate backlash. In response, SAG-AFTRA said in a statement that it “believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Similarly, the United Kingdom’s acting union Equity stated<\/a>\u00a0“that tool is made up of performers’ work and we are concerned about where that work has come from, and if that’s been given consent to be used in that way.”<\/p>\n The Canadian actors union, ACTRA, said Norwood\u00a0was “nothing but lines of code<\/a>” that was wrongfully built from actual actors’ work.\u00a0<\/p>\nAI models\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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