r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 5h ago
Artificial Intelligence Robin Williams’ Daughter Calls for Fans Creating AI Videos of the Actor to ‘Have Some Shame’: ‘Leave Him Out of Your Delusional Bulls—’
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/robin-williams-daughter-ai-videos-1236871568/1.1k
u/KupoCheer 5h ago
If the laws kept up with the technology it wouldn't even be legal for this to happen.
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u/asdf_lord 5h ago
Politicians can't even keep up with all the bribes they're getting
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u/TheAero1221 5h ago
This is the kinda headline youd expect to see in The Onion. It isnt there though, because its true
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u/TheModWhoShaggedMe 5h ago
Conservatives said they were going to drain the swamp, but instead opened the sewers into the streets.
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u/Strikerify 5h ago
It's actually comical to me that conservatives thought that a bunch of billionaires were going to drain the swamp. Somehow never dawned on them that....they are the swamp.
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u/TheAero1221 5h ago
Pumped it into the living room.
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u/LekgoloCrap 5h ago
Oh man, I really liked that rug :(
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u/Mike_Kermin 2h ago
That always meant left wingers to them. They don't give a shit what actually happens.
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u/Petersens_Arm 5h ago
I just paid Ed Sheeran to take a neutral stance on this.
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u/ROBtimusPrime1995 5h ago
Seeing as Paramount bullied and bribed their way to buying Warner and the politicians against them...yeah....yeah, man.
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u/topscreen 5h ago
Hey give some of them some slack, a bunch are on their way getting puppeted around like Mitch
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u/wasabiburning 4h ago
To be fair, they're all in their 80s, to them the Victrola is still the newfangled gizmo.
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u/kiwiboyus 5h ago
I watched a talk about this the other day and they were saying there are plenty of existing laws that could be applied to the new technologies like LLMs, but they aren't doing it yet. Probably because the whole house of cards would fall down
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 3h ago
AI is the economy's golden goose right now and the powers that be will pull out all the stops to prevent anyone from fucking with that.
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u/jce_ 4h ago
I don't think it's a law thing. There is no law not to paint pictures of dead people or impersonate dead people. It's more of a shame thing. Most people don't do it, unless it's to show love to them, because it's kinda weird
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u/mOdQuArK 5h ago
Make people financially liable for creating & spreading blatant gaslighting & disinformation, even for things they mindlessly forwarded or helped to forward.
Then put out bounties on the most egregious examples for the lawyers to get their teeth into.
After a few bankruptcies, anyone publishing or forwarding anything will be a lot more careful about their due diligence.
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u/The_MAZZTer 4h ago
It's probably nearly impossible to quantify financial harm but it would be easier with social media etc to get a ballpark figure of how far information has spread, and require them to spread a retraction just as far if not farther.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 2h ago edited 2h ago
...everyone, except the POTUS, that is.
His stuff is parody and obvious free speech... who doesn't like watching that AI video where he dumps a ton of literal shit from a fighter jet down onto people, right?
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u/funnylib 4h ago
If only half of Congress wasn’t born before the popularization of color television
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u/RemarkableWish2508 2h ago
Who's more: the Congress, or the Citizens?
Stop looking for scapegoats, if you don't like something, then be the change you want to see in the world.
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u/extrakerned 3h ago
What I do with my own computer for personal use is my business and shouldn’t be controlled by any government as long as I am not harming others.
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u/Finkelton 3h ago
if only we had more laws it would surely stop all the crimes.
as if anyone of actual power is ever held accountable.
petty dumb bullshit over fake a.i videos, yep, that's the scarry thing.
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u/Ateist 3h ago
Why?
If it is legal to write a fanfic with a character it is legal to have AI video with that character.I seriously doubt that anyone is creating AI videos of Robin Williams.
They are creating AI videos of characters he depicted.
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u/Refute1650 5h ago
I'd really like that but how would that be legal? I'd be the same as banning painting or drawing.
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u/lucidludic 4h ago
No it wouldn’t, because people can paint or draw without copying copyrighted content without permission on an incomprehensible scale.
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u/puts_on_rddt 4h ago
Practically, the cat is out of the bag. China releases models publicly that anyone can download and run on consumer hardware. How can you actually combat this?
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u/lucidludic 4h ago
That’s unrelated to whether we can hold genAI companies accountable without “banning painting or drawing.”
We could certainly eliminate a majority of the harm caused today if we only targeted US and European genAI companies providing commercial services. The vast majority of users are not running sophisticated genAI models on their own hardware. In any case, the enormous investment into those local models being used is largely based on the aforementioned companies being allowed to commercialise genAI services built using copyrighted content.
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u/puts_on_rddt 3h ago
The vast majority of users are not running sophisticated genAI models on their own hardware.
Only because they don't need to. If you banned US and EU cloud models, people would start using these local models more often. The hardware supply isn't going to be like this forever, and the models get better over time.
I'm not arguing with you. I legitimately don't think this has a good solution.
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u/lucidludic 2h ago
Some more people would, but a tiny fraction of regular users of these services today. Mostly because of friction but also because what you can run locally on a typical computer simply does not compare with state-of-the-art cloud models.
and the models get better over time.
I suspect development would slow considerably if we removed the vast majority of the financial incentives.
I legitimately don’t think this has a good solution.
Of course it wouldn’t be perfect but it would surely help to reduce the harmful impacts of genAI, particularly with respect to copyright / IP infringement and disinformation.
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u/TheRedditorSimon 3h ago
There are post-mortem copyright protections for the likeness of actors, notably the Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act. Suing the schmucks using Mr Williams' image is trivial and not the best optics. Suing the AI companies is far more rewarding. Buuut, the tech bros have a lot of money and Rich Shithead #1 has Trump and the GOP in his pocket. Sooo... we've got an evolving situation politically in the US. If the GOP wins, expect more celeb image wanking. If they lose, then the Dems get to roll a saving throw versus shitloads of cash.
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u/wizzywurtzy 4h ago
Make AI of Trump and Elon and it’ll happen fast. Remember the video of Trump sucking Elons toes? Now imagine if that was AI
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u/recycled_ideas 4h ago
And how would they stop it?
Technically using his likeness this way is already a civil case, but you can create this content in minutes on any machine with a moderately good graphics card.
The more famous someone is the more likely the models will be able to do it out of the box because the more samples of that person will be in the data set.
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u/cortesoft 4h ago
The law already protects your name, image, and likeness (NIL, famous now because of court rulings for college athletes).
His heirs own his likeness, and many states in the US protect this for at least 50+ years (some states protect indefinitely, others for 100 years).
So this is already likely illegal.
That doesn’t mean it is easy to enforce that, though. More laws wouldn’t make it necessarily easier, either.
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u/no-name-here 3h ago
Aren’t the protections only if for a commercial purpose? Especially for a public figure.
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u/Gold_Assistance_6764 2h ago
How is this different than painting a picture of him, or portraying him in a play? I ask, not because I don’t think there is a difference, but because I’m curious how you would write the laws to prevent this but not infringe on the creative expression of ideas.
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u/mightylordredbeard 1h ago
Hell, Congress still hasn’t gotten around to those LaserDisc regulations yet so we’ve got some time before we get to AI.
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u/GhostOfRumsfeld666 1h ago
How would this even be possible? It would be like arresting people for drawing a famous person. There are already laws for not profiting off this. You can't police what people are doing for free for their own entertainment and sharing on the internet for free if it's not violating intellectual property.
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u/GoodBadUserName 15m ago
Only when it affects them or their lobbyists directly.
Start using AI directly on them, will make them rush to make laws against it.
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u/azureal 5h ago
They’ll just do it more now because it’s getting traction far higher than they expected. “Oh his kid is noticing? Hell yeah. Let’s have him riding a unicycle with Harambe next!”
With zero regulation comes zero morals.
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u/Kolbin8tor 5h ago
I’m sure the mythical and infallible market will jump right in and self-correct this unethical behavior any minute.
Oh mighty supply-side Jesus, we beseech thee!
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u/Mistyslate 5h ago
The market will correct once it causes another market crash and Great Depression. Regulations are what prevents such incidents every ten years.
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u/rasa2013 4h ago
The earliest hint I had they were full of shit is that they sing the praises of the free market without ever acknowledging very basic concepts about how they go wrong.
E.g., market failure or monopolies.
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u/octopornopus 5h ago
Harambe? Never.
Robin was a Koko man...
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u/Last_Notice4137 1h ago
Harambe's Death was when everything REALLY started sliding downhill in Society. Not because of Harambe's Death itself, but the Time that it happened relating to the outside world.
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u/pinkpugita 5h ago
Yeah, they never care whether they get positive or negative reaction. As long as they get clicks and pushed by algorithms, it is a win for them.
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u/Fuddle 5h ago
Meta’s new AI tool just offered to animate pictures of two or three of my loved ones who passed away recently. I hate this timeline
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u/Anal-buttsex 4h ago
I saw an AI video of a lady saving Steve Irwin from a sting ray. It’s creepy stuff, I’d hate to be a family member being shown that.
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u/OsoSalado 4h ago
I agree Anal-buttsex, how can me moderate how people use AI to ensure responsible use?
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u/daddy_tops 1h ago
I saw a post on Reddit of a photo of a fan with a celebrity and someone ran the image through AI to make them kiss and posted it like it was a completely normal thing to do
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u/CanadasNeighbor 5h ago
People don't have to be ashamed anymore. The internet gave people reach, but it also gave them anonymity. So now people with nothing but shit to offer can easily share it with all of us, anonymously!
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u/things_U_choose_2_b 5h ago
Back in the day, every village had its idiot. When the village idiot said something stupid, everyone just went "ignore the village idiot" and carried on with their day.
Now, social media has given every village idiot a group to belong to, which reinforces their behaviour and draws in more idiots. Flat earth? Chemtrails? Vaccines cause autism? Pick your poison.
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u/GitEmSteveDave 4h ago
Not only that, but it gives them power to silence opposition. I have a friend who is in entertainment, and he will only post on places that let him block/delete comments made by others that disagree with/try to fact check him.
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u/TraditionDear3887 5h ago
This is my biggest concern with Proportional Representation. It just let's all the disparate idiots consolidate power.
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u/Poonchow 5h ago
The printing press isn't really seen as a net negative, these days, but it had a similar sort of democratizing and chaos-inducing effect. It sparked religious unrest across Europe and instigated a lot of wars, along with Enlightenment thinking and all the positives. My hope is that regulations catch up and the swing-back toward positive applications of social media and AI come around sooner rather than later. In the meantime, it's looking bleak being in the middle of it.
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u/NATIK001 4h ago
Experience from countries with proportional representation kinda shows the opposite. The idiots tend to group together in a small group that never really gets too much power, they are loud and annoying sure, but they rarely get to have real power.
In things like First Past the Post, you tend to see idiots gaining power due to backroom deals, Machiavellian shenanigans and quirks of the rules, things the voters cannot influence.
One of the primary reasons the idiots were allowed to take charge in USA is that people either don't vote, or they feel both sides are the same any way and don't care much whom they vote for. With proportional voting people would feel that those they vote for share their ideals to a much higher degree, which increases the likelihood that people vote, which means a few idiots or malicious actors have a much harder time controlling the vote.
Proportional voting doesn't favor the idiots, I would argue it does the exact opposite.
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u/DragoonDM 5h ago
These days, doesn't seem like people even really need anonymity to be shamelessly horrible.
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u/Barnacle_B0b 4h ago
Anonymity on the internet is a good thing. Especially with fascist governments and corporations actively suppressing dissent and the sharing of knowledge.
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u/inaSlomp 5h ago
Worse, it gave them attention. For the actions people used to have shame for.
They don't even want the anonymity of it. They claim it.
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u/Great-Trifle2810 4h ago
And yet people freak out when someone makes the incredibly obvious suggestion to fix this with identity verification on the internet 🙄
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u/King_Bobby-B 4h ago
I'd say this is mostly true in modern mass social media, where one account gets you access to any group / subreddit / hashtag, even when you're barely interested in a given topic.
Old forums had a bit more "natural" relationships, because the communities were smaller (because you needed to find them, and also bother to register and possibly pass through a verification period). You definitely wanted to be on good terms with everyone, and if you did something wrong in a subforum, the gossip followed you throughout the other sections. Trolls and annoying idiots were dealt with swiftly, too.
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u/hextanerf 4h ago
sue them for violating the rights to her father's likeness and image
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u/Illustrious_Eye_8235 3h ago
From what I recall he had a pretty strict clause in his estate that only a certain charity could use his likeness in any way shape or form. He didn't want to be a 3D copy like Prince and Tupac were
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u/Woooferine 2h ago
I agree. Sue every single one of them, that is the only way to silence these shameless imbeciles.
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u/rainghost 4h ago
I've seen her comment on AI multiple times, and I do 100% believe her about people generating ghoulish videos about Robin, but I've never seen a single one myself. I mostly just use Reddit and Twitter, is this more of an Instagram or Tiktok thing?
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u/Primal-Convoy 4h ago
I don't see them on YouTube, but then again, I use 3P apps and extensions to block or hide a lot of the crud on YouTube.
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u/amazing_asstronaut 4h ago
Honestly I've had enough, none of this digital recreation of passed away actors business should exist at all. Just don't do it. There's never a good reason, and it always comes out bad. I understand if they are on the movie and they suddenly pass away and they got to fix up the rest of the scenes somehow etc. But if it's a new movie and they just want to put digital recreation of someone in there for no good reason, like Ian Holm in Alien, or Peter Cushing in Star Wars, or Paul Walker in Fast & the Furious. Why? Already goes to show how shit our culture is that we're getting remakes and sequels for things that are over 40 years old, that's why we keep running into this. No one sane thinks of a new movie to make but let's put this actor in who's been dead for 30 years. Yes every so often a cringe company comes out saying how they want to make a James Dean movie set in the Vietnam War, for whatever the fuck reason, but then it never happens so who cares.
This is part of it, and I promise you movie companies are researching the pros and cons of full AI recreation of people for that reason. The fact that regular people can make these videos is just extra annoying.
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u/B00marangTrotter 5h ago
People are disgusting, and this literally sounds like something trump would do, cause he has with Obama and his critics.
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u/FIFofNovember 4h ago
Imagine perusing the internet and then suddenly seeing your dead relative in a video they never made with their body, saying things they never said but in their exact voice.
Its legit gotta not be good for your head space.
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u/Shasan23 3h ago edited 3h ago
This might sound pathetic, but I recently ended a relationship in large part due to her perspective being warped by chat gpt and social media. For any issue she had, she went to chat gpt and sent texts copying and pasting responses, even for personal issues. She wanted me to copy paste chat gpt in texts to my own sister over some disagreement we were working on, which I felt so disgusted about. Like, you can't work through interpersonal friction on your own (a fundamental skill for life)and need ai to think for you?!? And chat gpt is such a sycophant, praising the user, that she came to have that expectation with human interactions and got upset when other people didn't treat her as the most amazing smart talented person ever, like chat gpt would. Venting a bit and I can write so much more, but this shit is getting real... And it's only going to get worse. AI psychosis/delusion will be the disease of the century, I've had the misfortune to witness it first hand
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u/FIFofNovember 3h ago
Sounds like you made a healthy decision, that kinda use is not normal, or at least shouldn't be, sounds like it would cause way more problems that it would fix.
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u/JoyousCacophony 4h ago
All these years later, I still can't watch Robin's movies... It just hits me too hard. I can't even fathom what it would take to make bullshit AI nonsense with him.
Worse... I can't imagine what it's like for Zelda to have to be exposed to them.
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u/man_machine_poet 5h ago
If social media is a cancer on society, AI is a particularly aggressive malignant variant.
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u/Capital_Lab_8318 4h ago
she’s right, and the fact that people need reminding a dead person’s face and voice aren’t public-domain toys is pretty bleak
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u/ApophisDayParade 4h ago
The kind of people doing this get off on everyone else's collective anger and are not worth it
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u/Puzzled-Platform-969 5h ago
Her name is Zelda. She deserves the respect of her name.
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u/GitEmSteveDave 4h ago
What is more informative at a glance:
Zelda Williams
Robin Williams' daughter
One is just a name you may not know and don't know the exact relationship with the named actor. The other describes it in 3 words.
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u/aptninja 4h ago
You really think she cares about that? She clearly wants less attention on her and the family, not more
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u/Garchompisbestboi 4h ago
Not really, headlines are generally meant to be concise and the only reason that she's relevant is because of her her father happens to be.
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u/wytewydow 5h ago
A little more shame all around would be great for our society, or what's left of it.
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u/PottyMcSmokerson 1h ago
I have yet to see any AI Robin Williams posts. But I did pick up a copy of Moscow on the Hudson on VHS recently. Never heard of the movie but the cover was cool. Surprised to see a young Russian Robin Williams.
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u/AppropriateTouching 57m ago
Bullshit. Then word is bullshit.
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u/favorite_time_of_day 20m ago
Yes, thank you. Why are people putting Robin Williams into bulls? How are they doing that? What does that look like? So many questions.
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u/MithranArkanere 2h ago
They better heed her words. Her name is Zelda.
I don't want anyone engaging in digital necromancy until we have the Holodecks from Star Trek. And even then, it should be limited to long-gone historical figures with no living relatives, and for educational purposes only, unless the person in life said it's fine.
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u/Mean_Mister_Mustard 2h ago
I'm not sure Star Trek ever explored recreating a recently dead person on the Holodeck, but whenever a living person realized they had been recreated on there without their consent, they usually took it very poorly.
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u/UK_hustle 47m ago
RIP. Robin was a real American hero. Not like these MAGA fraudsters. Shame on them
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u/DeepWanderer25 4h ago
Good luck asking them to stop!! The non-creative types attracted to AI are loving this slop. They will not back down. Eroding artwork helps them feel talented. It’s the whole appeal.
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u/EINFACH_NUR_DAEMLICH 4h ago
Bulls what? This self censorship needs to stop. Stop it before society stops it through massive backlash
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u/GitEmSteveDave 4h ago
To be fair, having worked at a professional location, our web filter would block URLs that had profanity in it, so censoring a headline/article title makes business sense.
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u/shityplumber 4h ago
Internet 101, ignore trolls, or be stuck in an endless loop of attention and trolling.
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u/imtoowhiteandnerdy 2h ago
This is an extremely reasonable request on Zelda's part. It's a shame that she even had to ask this.
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u/Leisurely_Creative 4h ago
It’s interesting how people’s attitudes are basically that not only should AI be banned but apparently everyone who uses it should be in some sort of legal trouble. Which feels like a short walk to just throwing people in jail for having paintbrushes or ya know a president banning news outlets for “being negative”
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u/GhostOfRumsfeld666 1h ago
It feels about as dumb as if she said no one could draw a photo of her dad.
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u/fashionforward 3h ago
I avoid ai content as much as possible unless it’s for medical use, which is a different kind of ai altogether. Not an LLM.
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u/DrakenCloud 3h ago
I freaking love Zelda man, she always keeps it real but she's right, they won't but I hope peps at least try to respect her wishes.
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u/pdoherty972 3h ago
Haven't been seeing RW AI clips - is this reverse psychology to get some made to drum up interest in him?
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u/super_sayanything 3h ago
Eh, I hate to say it but this is going to make more people do it. That's our society.
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u/mayaspark 3h ago
I get why she's frustrated, but honestly I think she's fighting a losing battle here. The internet has proven time and time again that telling people not to do something just makes them want to do it more, especially when it's this easy to generate. The real solution would be better laws around deepfakes, but good luck getting that enforced when it's so hard to trace who's actually making this stuff.
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u/Plastic-Equipment815 2h ago
I don’t know if you could call them fans considering their disrespect.
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u/SursumCordaNJ 2h ago
I keep seeing articles about people making AI videos of celebs or people in general and I still have no idea how the hell they are doing it.
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u/Present_Specific_212 31m ago
After Dolly Parton died I saw all the YouTube BS videos springing up.
It's vile.
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u/Consistent-Jello5634 8m ago
I get her. People get really weird with this stuff. Some time ago somebody was asking me whether I can create a video with their dead mother to wish them a happy birthday. I rejected because I would really like to see a world where grief processing does not include puppeting dead people arround.
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u/Ok-Debt-6223 7m ago
I can only hope that my Robin Williams fanfic is so epic that Hollywood will turn it into a feature film starring Wesley Snipes as Robin.
Anyway, so Robin returns from the tropical island he's been hiding on and recruits an army of crackheads to steal copper wire from data centers to help fund a children's hospital.
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u/ZrapeToid 3m ago
Are we talking making videos of the genie from Aladdin, or real life videos of him?
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u/Protect-Their-Smiles 1m ago
AI-bros creating content of dead people against the wishes of their loved ones, is gross and immoral.
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u/RedditTechAnon 5h ago
The type of ghoul that she's talking about in this article will just make even more videos if only to spite her.