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
