Zelda Williams asks fans to stop making AI videos of her father

Zelda Williams wants the AI videos of her father to stop. On 21 September, the director posted on X that a clip circulating as private footage of Robin Williams is "clearly AI, and not even particularly convincing AI", and told whoever made it to leave him out of it and let him rest.

"Anyone who claims to be a fan who believes it clearly listened to his movies on mute because that voice is robotic and terrible," she wrote. "That said, a human made a robot create it, and to you I say: leave him out of your delusional bullshit and let him rest."

The clip in question is being passed around as a suppressed recording in which the actor says something he never said. It is not a deepfake of a speech he gave. It is a fabricated video of a man who has been dead since 2014 presented as evidence, which is the part that puts it past ordinary fan editing.

Williams has asked for this before. In October 2025 she wrote on Instagram asking people to stop sending her AI videos of her father, saying she did not want to see them and would not. Her latest post adds a sharper argument: a synthetic performance takes consent away from the person being performed, and the audience is not owed an explanation for why that is wrong.

She also said plainly where she stands on the technology. In further remarks reported by the Times of India, she wrote that she is not an impartial voice in SAG-AFTRA's fight over AI: "I've witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad. This isn't theoretical; it is very, very real."

For anyone who makes video with these tools, the case is the clearest version of a question that comes up in every project: whose face, voice and performance are in the prompt, and whether that person can say no. Robin Williams cannot. His daughter can, and has now done it twice in public.

The tools that made the clip do not ask; the people who publish it are the only ones who can decide not to.