As the AI plagiarism machines continue to churn out ever-more semi-realistic slop, including videos of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman eating a barbecued Pikachu, the harm to any number of industries is incalculable. But there is also the personal harm, and no one has captured it better than actor and director Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Robin Williams, in a recent post on her Instagram.
As reported by PC Gamer, Zelda Williams posted an Instagram story (that has since expired) in which she begged her followers to “just stop sending me AI videos of Dad.”
Sora, the AI video app from OpenAI, is flooding the internet with macabre depictions of both dead and living celebrities and public figures saying and doing things they’ve never said nor done. Obviously this can be enormously damaging for people’s reputations, with credulous viewers reposting such footage as fact. But what doesn’t always get thought about is how it affects the loved ones of those depicted, especially of those who have died. Such videos don’t need to be outlandish or offensive to achieve this, either—if anything, the more benign a video is, the more insidious and upsetting it can be.
“Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t,” Williams wrote in her post. “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.”
As Rich Stanton points out in his PCG article, Robin Williams was famous for not wanting his face and voice used to hawk any old plastic tat, so it’s especially vile to note the constant dripping from the AI sewage pipe that’s putting words into his mouth. As his daughter puts it, “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,” Zelda Williams continues. “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 then, in unimprovable words, the actor sums up everything that’s so grim about it all:
And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ 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 very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.
Even OpenAI is balking at the way the just-launched Sora 2 is being used, with Altman backtracking on its ability to use any copyrighted materials, saying from now on companies will have to opt in. But this offers nothing to protect individuals, or their loved ones, from being depicted in such intrusive and ghoulish ways.
Remember when AI was going to do all the boring jobs for us so we could live happier, freer lives? Yeah, turns out all it’s capable of is cheap tricks and making people sad.
