AI brings Williams back - and it's morally bankrupt

As I was scrolling on TikTok the other evening, I was stopped in my tracks when I came across a video of the late actor, Robin Williams. In the face-to-camera clip, “he” was discussing loneliness, low mood and depression, telling viewers that things will get better.

- EMMA CLARKE

The likeness to the Mrs Doubtfire star not only struck me as uncanny, it disturbed me to my core – because, although it looked and sounded like him, it wasn’t. Someone had gone out of their way to create an AI-generated version of him, some 11 years after his death.

What was even more crass was the nature of the video, given that Williams took his own life in 2014, following health issues after being misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s. I swiftly reported it and came out of the app, no longer feeling the desire to watch short-form videos before bed.

But it’s not just people on the internet and fans who see this type of content. Taking to social media on Monday, Williams’s daughter Zelda implored people to stop defiling her dad’s memory in this “disgusting” way, calling it “slop” and stating that it’s not what her father would have wanted.

“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,” she wrote on her Instagram Story.