Robin Williams' daughter begs fans to stop sending her AI videos of late father (www.the-independent.com)

Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor Robin Williams, publicly begged fans to stop sending AI-generated videos that recreate her father’s likeness and voice, calling the clips “dumb” and emotionally damaging. Citing his 2014 death and the Lewy body dementia he suffered, she said such recreations aren’t what he would have wanted and condemned them as exploitative shortcuts that reduce real lives to “vaguely looks and sounds” facsimiles. Her plea follows earlier warnings she made during the actors’ fight over AI and comes amid a surge of synthetic videos on social platforms—fueled by new tools like OpenAI’s Sora 2—that have produced fake ads and fabricated celebrity appearances on TikTok. The episode highlights urgent ethical and technical issues for the AI/ML community: increasingly accessible generative models and voice-cloning tools can recreate deceased or living people without consent, amplifying harm to families, undermining performers’ livelihoods, and muddying provenance and truth online. It also underscores policy gaps—copyright, posthumous rights, platform moderation—and the need for robust detection, provenance/watermarking standards, and consent frameworks. While some performers (and collaborators) have discussed recreations with family permission, Zelda Williams’ reaction is a reminder that technical capability outpaces social and legal norms, and responsible deployment requires clearer guardrails and respect for human dignity.