Oman Film Festival opens submissions with a new AI film competition

Robin Williams' daughter to the people making AI videos of him: 'have some shame'

Zelda Williams says a viral "private video" of her late father talking conspiracy theories is AI, and badly made AI. Control over a dead performer's likeness still runs through relatives who notice, not law.

Zelda Williams has asked the people making AI videos of her father to have some shame. The clip going around, passed off as a "private video" of Robin Williams talking about conspiracy theories, is "clearly AI, and not even particularly convincing AI", she wrote on X on Monday, and she pointed out that the voice alone gives it away to anyone who has actually watched his films. Her line to whoever built it: just because he's gone does not mean he's now your puppet.

Robin Williams died in 2014, and this is at least the third time in a year his daughter has had to say this in public. Last month she and her brothers Zak and Cody reopened their father's Instagram account, partly as an archive of real footage and partly to push back on what she called rampant AI abuse of his voice and likeness.

The part that reaches past one family is the enforcement gap. Control over a dead performer's likeness sits with relatives who happen to notice, not with a regulator. OpenAI paused Martin Luther King Jr. generations in October 2025 after his estate objected, and said authorized representatives or estate owners could request that a likeness be kept out of Sora cameos, which is an opt-out process that has to be repeated platform by platform. In practice, if your work leans on a real person, living or dead, get written permission from whoever holds those rights and file it with the project, because the family's answer outlasts the post.

Still open: which tool produced the clip, and whether any platform has taken it down.

Sources: Variety, Geo, The Verge, CNN, 21 and 22 September 2026

Tom Cruise on AI: 'it's coming and it's going to happen'

Tom Cruise called AI inevitable at BAFTA and argued audiences want real things, but he never said where generated images belong in a film, and no recording of the answer has been published.

Tom Cruise got "the AI question" from Edith Bowman at BAFTA: A Life in Pictures in London on Monday night, and answered for more than six minutes to applause. The one sentence about the technology treats it like weather: "You know, it is coming and it's going to happen... But people want to see real things." His advice to anyone making something was to keep creating.

What he did not do is draw a line. Deadline noted he never addressed the downsides of AI directly, and he said nothing about generated images in his own films. Inevitability is not approval, and in June 2023 he joined a SAG-AFTRA negotiating session to back the union's AI protections for performers.

In practice, the test he named is audience belief rather than tooling, so it is one a small team can pass. When the loudest advocate for doing it for real declines to set a standard, disclosure gets decided by the people making the work, so keep a shot log of which tools you used, where and why, before anyone asks.

Reported from the room by Variety, Deadline and TheWrap, 21 and 22 September 2026.