Zelda Williams has condemned a wave of AI deepfakes featuring her late father, Robin Williams, calling them “disgusting” and “not art.” Her post comes as OpenAI’s Sora 2 video tool fuels a flood of synthetic celebrity clips, reigniting debate over consent, legacy, and the ethics of digital resurrection.
As one of the most loved actors to ever hit Hollywood screens, Robin Williams left behind quite a legacy when he died in 2014.
AI deepfakes of the comedian have started chipping away at that legacy and, worse, poking into his family’s private grief. His daughter Zelda has had enough.
She called the trend “gross” and “disrespectful” after a new wave of fake clips of her father began bouncing around TikTok and YouTube.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” she wrote in an Instagram story on Monday.
“Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me.”
Zelda, who directed last year’s Lisa Frankenstein, said people are taking her father’s likeness and grinding it up into “disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings.”
“You’re not making art,” she added.
“You’re just recycling the past and pretending it’s the future.”
Her post landed as OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generator rolled out and creators piled in. Within days, feeds filled up with phony Robin Williams award speeches and dressed-up Apple spoofs that can trip people up at a glance.
Other celebs got dragged in, too. There were Fake Drake tracks, bogus Betty White cameos, and clips pushed out by accounts that skipped disclosure and passed the content off as a tribute.
OpenAI’s “solution” so far has been to direct people to a form they can fill in to flag a problem. There still isn’t a clean way for families or artists to lock down a likeness before it gets used.
The company’s media lead, Varun Shetty, told The Guardian: “We’ll work with rights holders to block characters from Sora at their request and respond to takedown requests.”
By now, it feels as though the harm has already been done.
Zelda Williams’s Instagram story calls out the deepfakes specifically, as it describes what it feels like to watch her dad get turned into bait for clicks. She also speaks for the greater good.
“To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’... is maddening,” she wrote.
“AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very end of the line.”
The post comes as a reality check to the regurgitation or bastardization of who was an acclaimed figure in the field of acting. A legendary figure meshed into something cheap and temporary.
Her message cuts deep. The daughter of a man who made millions laugh wants everyone to knock it off. Let him rest in peace.
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