Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda is speaking out against the use of artificial intelligence to recreate the sound of her father’s voice.
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI. I have witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot give consent, like daddy,” she wrote in her Instagram Story on Sunday. “This is not theoretical, it is very real. I’ve heard of AI making its ‘voice’ say whatever people want it to say, and while I personally find it disturbing, the implications go far beyond my own feelings.”
Her comments follow the Writer Guild of America’s strike against the studios over issues such as the use of AI, among other sticking points. Although the WGA has reached a tentative agreement, SAG-AFTRA is currently still on strike over its use of AI and other issues.
“Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance,” Zelda continued in her post. “These recreations are at their best a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst a hideous Frankensteinian monster, composed of the worst parts of everything this industry is, rather than what it should stand for.”
Williams died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 62. He had previously been diagnosed with anxiety, severe depression and Parkinson’s disease; An autopsy revealed that he also had Lewy Body dementia.
Read Zelda’s full post below.
More to come…
