Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Hollywood comedy icon Robin Williams, has had enough of people sending her AI slop videos of her father.
“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” the director wrote in a Stories post on Instagram. “Stop believing 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,” she added. “But please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone, even, full stop.”
Williams’ comments come a week after ChatGPT maker OpenAI launched Sora 2, a TikTok-like text-to-video generating app that serves up AI slop to the masses.
Users got to work, immediately generating photorealistic videos of deceased celebrities, including pop icon Michael Jackson, cosmologist Stephen Hawking, and painter Bob Ross.
Whether dead celebs are fair game on Sora 2 remains unclear. OpenAI promised to “block depictions of public figures” in its user policy. However, a spokesperson told PCMag that it does “allow the generation of historical figures.”
“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,” Williams wrote.
“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,” she added. “Gross.”
Williams’ comments highlight growing disillusionment at companies shoving AI into every aspect of users’ lives. Particularly when it comes to the substitution of human creativity, critics have balked at the emergence of entire social media apps dedicated to pumping out slop, like Sora 2, Meta’s Vibes, and YouTube, which has encouraged users to AI-generate short-form videos.
“AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed,” Williams wrote. “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 not the first time Williams has spoken out against the use of AI in creative fields. In 2023, she spoke out in support of striking Hollywood actors, who were fighting for protections against AI.
At the time, tech to recreate an actor’s voice was hitting its stride, triggering a fiery debate surrounding an artist’s ownership over their own voice.
“I am not an impartial voice in [the Screen Actors’ Guild’s] fight against AI,” she wrote at the time. “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,” she added. “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.”
Williams isn’t the first to protest her parents’ legacy being turned into slop. Last year, Kelly Carlin, the daughter of late comedian George Carlin, similarly took aim at the tech.
“My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination,” she tweeted at the time, responding to the announcement of an hour-long comedy special that featured an AI version of her father’s voice.
“No machine will ever replace his genius,” she wrote. “These AI-generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again.”
“Let’s let the artist’s work speak for itself,” she added. “Here’s an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to?”
More on AI slop: Taylor Swift Fans Furious as She’s Caught Using Sloppy AI in Video for New Album