Unfortunately, AI content creators have no shame, and neither do social media content curation algorithms; in the current configuration of the world, those two entities form a closed loop that produces and serves this shameful content to unwilling bystanders. From a God’s-eye perspective it is easy to say “we should change this system so this doesn’t happen”, but from within the system each participant can only say “let us follow our incentives to become slightly more rich than other participants” (and any entity that might’ve once held a God’s-eye view along with the power to make such a change has long since abdicated their role).
It is decent microcosm of the state of the world if you’re looking to understand why younger generations seem so fatalistically, nihilistically depressed - they are simply aware that nobody can break these vicious cycles.
Otherwise, you're right. A system where the selection pressure happens through money and attention is bound to devolve to appeal to the strongest most primitive of desires.
Bob Ross was a content creator, and I would like to think if he were alive he'd still be painting, just using a different platform to share. I don't think he would care one bit if people made AI art as long as they were happy and kind.
The video Robin's daughter referenced in her tweet is being circulated as a "private video" of him. In other words, people are claiming it's a real video, or being led to believe it's a real video. It's not and therefore this isn't some misguided AI-generated act of love. It's deception, almost certainly to garner and possibly monetize "attention".
Before this article I wasn't even aware but 100% there's going to be a huge increase in Robin Williams AI saying/doing whack shit just like all the other AI footage of famous people.
If you are publicly famous, your image no longer is owned by you, especially true with AI now.
After coming back from a friends birthday party, I said to myself, I need to learn a few dance moves.
So I searched on IG, watched and liked a few simply from curiosity. Then the algorithm started sending me more, and more. It was wonderful.
Flip that and you’re Zelda. You look at one or several and you get more (Robin Williams gets clicks, don’t you know).
Eventually the number of recommended dance videos fell off. But by then I had followed a few, so men dancing still show up from time to time.
They say you’re not to read the criticism or comments if you’re a writer. I thought it was just because they’re depressing. But also engaging with someone else’s vitriol is like getting an infection and just recalling the most awful of words will reinfect your psyche.
All this to say it’s not just evil people making sickening content. There’s good things coming through that pipe—Remember to put the phone down and go outside once in a while. And prolly think before you share. Yeah. That too.
Zelda Williams is getting the AI videos forwarded to her by fans.
People who are Robin Williams fans aren't making AI videos of him.
The kind of people who are making videos of him are people trying to get engagement on social media.
Either building an audience to then be an "influencer", or to sell the account to a marketing firm who will then use it to kickstart an online brand.
Marketing company has a client with some stupid new kitchen gadget, so they buy a pumped up account that had Robin Williams memes intermixed with some stolen baking/cooking cartoons and memes.
2. Nobody forces her to be on platforms where she can meet with AI BS of her father, she can interact only with her friends to avoid public BS and not try to be public celebrity (only thanks to beging his daughter, not because she achieved something on herself)
3. She is known ONLY because she is Robin William's daughter, somehow I feel there are monetary reasons behind her complaining, if not, then follow point 2
She has now asked three times, in 2023 about his voice, in 2025 about the videos, and again today. What changed between them is not the technology, it is what she is asking for. The first time it was stop. Now it is have some shame. That is someone who has worked out there is nobody to appeal to, only an audience, and asking an audience for restraint has never scaled. The enforcement falls on the family, personally, every round, because it does not fall on anyone else.
I remember being stunned by Mork from Ork. Then watched as the same guy grew into one of the most iconic and loved humans on Earth. Given the amount of brain share that he earned it's kind of inevitable that so many people try to bring him back. I hope his daughter can also feel the love in it.
1. You appreciate Robin Williams and were he here right now judging you for how you honor his memory, would he approve?
2. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then if he were would he approve of you bringing pain to someone he loved dearly? Why would you do that to Robin Williams?
3. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then nothing matters and I bet I could get some views.
It's difficult to see love in these acts when they seem to be fundamentally selfish. Not at all what Robin Williams would do.
Should one not be free to invoke the visages of Einstein, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ (whichever version - and there are so many!), Genghis Khan, Confucius, et al.?
What about when poking fun at Hitler, such as Kung Fury and Jojo Rabbit do? Off limits?
Can one paint Bob Ross in a sci-fi setting? Is that unethical? Is it okay so long as a "real" artist does it and not an "AI artist"? Or can we seriously never depict him again because someone might get angry?
"Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater"?
Come on!
And we can't animate Bruce Lee? Or put him on stickers? Or have him in new movies? (Nevermind how Quentin Tarantino did him wrong.)
When I grew up Elvis effigies were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The people who liked this stuff are mostly dead or retired now so you don't see it as much, but it used to be a big deal. Really big deal.
So we can't do that anymore?
Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires for Christ's sake...
I'm glad you're asking. If you notice no one has said, especially Zelda, that you can't do these things. Obviously you can. You have access to a computer. The question you should be asking is should you do these things?
Also, this a good list of false equivalences. Robin Williams, when public, was empathetic, emotional, and arguably humanist. His memory isn't a caricature from people who have never known him, as you would see from Star Trek holo-deck episodes featuring Leonardo Da Vanci. His memory is something that is deeply important to people who are living. Some of those people simply appreciated his art and his behavior. One of those people is his daughter. You don't get to say what is right or wrong here. No one's going to stop you if you want to make a video of Robin Williams taking the Siegfried Oath, but you should understand why it is wrong.
Doesn’t the should part just completely ignore how we all know the world actually works which is kind of its own form of insanity. We humans can’t be trusted to follow basic rules like traffic laws. Right and wrong cease to matter much when 1) I want to be selfish and do what I please and 2) there’s technically nobody being harmed, feelings aside. But even then, from a net perspective, there’s probably many more people getting enjoyment from these AI videos than the people who are saddened by them.
It sucks for Zelda this saddens her so much, but if I were in her shoes it’s something I know I can’t control and so I’d try to embrace or ignore it.
Haven't seen the videos, but she seems to complain of videos claiming to be authentic private videos of him stating a particular political message — and of these videos being forwarded to her (possibly for verification?).
This has nothing to do with impersonating a deceases person but about rewriting (personal) history she finds shameful.
Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
One day you won't even think about it. Well, your descendants won't. The aversion dies with you.
Squeamishness over thinking and speaking is pretty rare. Visual creation is just a new dimension of our conversation, and it'll be as accessible and common as writing words down.
You know the old generation called the world wide web satanic? They died and we stopped worrying about it.
What should you not do here doesn't mean what will we stop you doing. It just means what's the wrong thing to do?
Maybe you're worrying about social pressure? I can see how general agreement that it's wrong to do XYZ can lead to forcibly preventing anybody at all from doing XYZ.
> Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
I think you're the only person here who really gets it.
We already have dozens of methods commonly used for preserving/impersonating/representing people who aren't in the room, and who are possibly deceased. These mediums have evolved over time, from spoken word and song and music, to scribbles and drawings and painting and sculptures, to acting and plays, to writing and printing, to audio and video, to computerized media, to AI-generated computerized media.
Of course any medium can be used tastefully or distastefully. But what the people in this comment section are overwhelmingly reacting to (and attempting to moralize) is their distaste for the medium itself. Distaste for a new medium is extremely common throughout history, and if history is any indication, this distaste tends to disappear quickly as older generations die and are replaced by newer generations for whom this "newfangled contraption" feels like a natural part of the world.
These arguments seem so quaint, like reading a letter from WW2. We live in the AI age! Wake up people, these things are happening and will not ever stop, we are not going back.
No. Just because lots of people do a thing does not make it acceptable, and "people are going to keep doing it" is not a valid reason to not try to stop it.
Lol, a couple of years go, grown men were getting into fist-fights over toilet paper and it's looking like they are about to wage war over a tank of juice.
Someone in the past probably said something similar:
"glove slap I demand satisfaction. Pistols at dawn. This is how we settle problems and there's no going back now." God made man and Colt made them equal, yes?
The current usage of AI is similarly unrefined and out of hand.
Robin Williams himself famously did humorous impersonations of recently-deceased celebrities and politicians. He was an irreverent comedian. You guys need to relax.
It's actually not the Streisand effect. The Streisand effect is about trying to smother a controversy and, in the process, breathing life into it.
Zelda is not exercising power or suppressing a controversy. This is just old fashioned dickheadedness. A generous interpretation would be juvenile trolling since they know their mark is vulnerable.
Typically a Streisand effect involves filing a lawsuit to try to stop something, which then raises awareness more broadly and makes the problem you’re suing to correct worse. In the canonical example, it’s “everyone stop taking pictures of my house!”, now pictures of your house are everywhere.
With a reasonably more generous definition, this case can indeed be considered a Streisand effect, if the problem gets worse by calling attention to it because now more idiots know about it. But a lawsuit would seal the deal!
Unfortunately, AI content creators have no shame, and neither do social media content curation algorithms; in the current configuration of the world, those two entities form a closed loop that produces and serves this shameful content to unwilling bystanders. From a God’s-eye perspective it is easy to say “we should change this system so this doesn’t happen”, but from within the system each participant can only say “let us follow our incentives to become slightly more rich than other participants” (and any entity that might’ve once held a God’s-eye view along with the power to make such a change has long since abdicated their role).
It is decent microcosm of the state of the world if you’re looking to understand why younger generations seem so fatalistically, nihilistically depressed - they are simply aware that nobody can break these vicious cycles.
> Unfortunately, content creators have no shame
FTFY.
Otherwise, you're right. A system where the selection pressure happens through money and attention is bound to devolve to appeal to the strongest most primitive of desires.
Bob Ross was a content creator, and I would like to think if he were alive he'd still be painting, just using a different platform to share. I don't think he would care one bit if people made AI art as long as they were happy and kind.
Bob Ross was not in any modern sense a content creator.
That's frankly a rather incorrect broad statement, and is pretty disrespectful to content creators.
Are people here not even reading the article?
The video Robin's daughter referenced in her tweet is being circulated as a "private video" of him. In other words, people are claiming it's a real video, or being led to believe it's a real video. It's not and therefore this isn't some misguided AI-generated act of love. It's deception, almost certainly to garner and possibly monetize "attention".
This lady needs some proper advice on this. She is only digging this hole deeper by feeding it attention.
Before this article I wasn't even aware but 100% there's going to be a huge increase in Robin Williams AI saying/doing whack shit just like all the other AI footage of famous people.
If you are publicly famous, your image no longer is owned by you, especially true with AI now.
After coming back from a friends birthday party, I said to myself, I need to learn a few dance moves.
So I searched on IG, watched and liked a few simply from curiosity. Then the algorithm started sending me more, and more. It was wonderful.
Flip that and you’re Zelda. You look at one or several and you get more (Robin Williams gets clicks, don’t you know).
Eventually the number of recommended dance videos fell off. But by then I had followed a few, so men dancing still show up from time to time.
They say you’re not to read the criticism or comments if you’re a writer. I thought it was just because they’re depressing. But also engaging with someone else’s vitriol is like getting an infection and just recalling the most awful of words will reinfect your psyche.
All this to say it’s not just evil people making sickening content. There’s good things coming through that pipe—Remember to put the phone down and go outside once in a while. And prolly think before you share. Yeah. That too.
The struggle is real:
2025:
Robin Williams' daughter pleads for people to stop sending AI videos of her dad
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45505626
2023:
Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda slams AI for recreating her father’s voice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37742529
Zelda Williams is getting the AI videos forwarded to her by fans.
People who are Robin Williams fans aren't making AI videos of him.
The kind of people who are making videos of him are people trying to get engagement on social media.
Either building an audience to then be an "influencer", or to sell the account to a marketing firm who will then use it to kickstart an online brand.
Marketing company has a client with some stupid new kitchen gadget, so they buy a pumped up account that had Robin Williams memes intermixed with some stolen baking/cooking cartoons and memes.
It's always about money...
4chan and Twitter: "Define shame"
I will play devil's advocate:
1. All she does is creating Streisand effect
2. Nobody forces her to be on platforms where she can meet with AI BS of her father, she can interact only with her friends to avoid public BS and not try to be public celebrity (only thanks to beging his daughter, not because she achieved something on herself)
3. She is known ONLY because she is Robin William's daughter, somehow I feel there are monetary reasons behind her complaining, if not, then follow point 2
She has now asked three times, in 2023 about his voice, in 2025 about the videos, and again today. What changed between them is not the technology, it is what she is asking for. The first time it was stop. Now it is have some shame. That is someone who has worked out there is nobody to appeal to, only an audience, and asking an audience for restraint has never scaled. The enforcement falls on the family, personally, every round, because it does not fall on anyone else.
I remember being stunned by Mork from Ork. Then watched as the same guy grew into one of the most iconic and loved humans on Earth. Given the amount of brain share that he earned it's kind of inevitable that so many people try to bring him back. I hope his daughter can also feel the love in it.
But shazbot to anyone who goes rule 34 on him.
There's a few different ways to look at this.
1. You appreciate Robin Williams and were he here right now judging you for how you honor his memory, would he approve?
2. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then if he were would he approve of you bringing pain to someone he loved dearly? Why would you do that to Robin Williams?
3. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then nothing matters and I bet I could get some views.
It's difficult to see love in these acts when they seem to be fundamentally selfish. Not at all what Robin Williams would do.
Perfectly stated. Thank you.
"Love is the most selfish of all the passions." — Alexandre Dumas
Should one not be free to invoke the visages of Einstein, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ (whichever version - and there are so many!), Genghis Khan, Confucius, et al.?
What about when poking fun at Hitler, such as Kung Fury and Jojo Rabbit do? Off limits?
Can one paint Bob Ross in a sci-fi setting? Is that unethical? Is it okay so long as a "real" artist does it and not an "AI artist"? Or can we seriously never depict him again because someone might get angry?
"Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater"?
Come on!
And we can't animate Bruce Lee? Or put him on stickers? Or have him in new movies? (Nevermind how Quentin Tarantino did him wrong.)
When I grew up Elvis effigies were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The people who liked this stuff are mostly dead or retired now so you don't see it as much, but it used to be a big deal. Really big deal.
So we can't do that anymore?
Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires for Christ's sake...
I'm glad you're asking. If you notice no one has said, especially Zelda, that you can't do these things. Obviously you can. You have access to a computer. The question you should be asking is should you do these things?
Also, this a good list of false equivalences. Robin Williams, when public, was empathetic, emotional, and arguably humanist. His memory isn't a caricature from people who have never known him, as you would see from Star Trek holo-deck episodes featuring Leonardo Da Vanci. His memory is something that is deeply important to people who are living. Some of those people simply appreciated his art and his behavior. One of those people is his daughter. You don't get to say what is right or wrong here. No one's going to stop you if you want to make a video of Robin Williams taking the Siegfried Oath, but you should understand why it is wrong.
Doesn’t the should part just completely ignore how we all know the world actually works which is kind of its own form of insanity. We humans can’t be trusted to follow basic rules like traffic laws. Right and wrong cease to matter much when 1) I want to be selfish and do what I please and 2) there’s technically nobody being harmed, feelings aside. But even then, from a net perspective, there’s probably many more people getting enjoyment from these AI videos than the people who are saddened by them.
It sucks for Zelda this saddens her so much, but if I were in her shoes it’s something I know I can’t control and so I’d try to embrace or ignore it.
Haven't seen the videos, but she seems to complain of videos claiming to be authentic private videos of him stating a particular political message — and of these videos being forwarded to her (possibly for verification?).
This has nothing to do with impersonating a deceases person but about rewriting (personal) history she finds shameful.
> should you do these things?
Emphatically yes.
Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
One day you won't even think about it. Well, your descendants won't. The aversion dies with you.
Squeamishness over thinking and speaking is pretty rare. Visual creation is just a new dimension of our conversation, and it'll be as accessible and common as writing words down.
You know the old generation called the world wide web satanic? They died and we stopped worrying about it.
I quite like truth, don't you? Or are you not a fan of it?
I mean I quite like jokes, metaphor, and libel, but one should probably have some restraint, details TBD.
Let's take speech away from people because they can't handle the freedom, then?
What should you not do here doesn't mean what will we stop you doing. It just means what's the wrong thing to do?
Maybe you're worrying about social pressure? I can see how general agreement that it's wrong to do XYZ can lead to forcibly preventing anybody at all from doing XYZ.
> Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
I think you're the only person here who really gets it.
We already have dozens of methods commonly used for preserving/impersonating/representing people who aren't in the room, and who are possibly deceased. These mediums have evolved over time, from spoken word and song and music, to scribbles and drawings and painting and sculptures, to acting and plays, to writing and printing, to audio and video, to computerized media, to AI-generated computerized media.
Of course any medium can be used tastefully or distastefully. But what the people in this comment section are overwhelmingly reacting to (and attempting to moralize) is their distaste for the medium itself. Distaste for a new medium is extremely common throughout history, and if history is any indication, this distaste tends to disappear quickly as older generations die and are replaced by newer generations for whom this "newfangled contraption" feels like a natural part of the world.
These arguments seem so quaint, like reading a letter from WW2. We live in the AI age! Wake up people, these things are happening and will not ever stop, we are not going back.
No. Just because lots of people do a thing does not make it acceptable, and "people are going to keep doing it" is not a valid reason to not try to stop it.
See the war on drugs
It’s never too late to start being a decent person to your fellow human.
Lol, a couple of years go, grown men were getting into fist-fights over toilet paper and it's looking like they are about to wage war over a tank of juice.
Most didn’t do any of that, so don’t be like the worst of us. We by are you so eager to make excuses for bad behavior?
Someone in the past probably said something similar:
"glove slap I demand satisfaction. Pistols at dawn. This is how we settle problems and there's no going back now." God made man and Colt made them equal, yes?
The current usage of AI is similarly unrefined and out of hand.
Robin Williams himself famously did humorous impersonations of recently-deceased celebrities and politicians. He was an irreverent comedian. You guys need to relax.
Yeah… he did them. He didn’t tell a computer to mock up a realdoll of them and share it for clicks.
Yes. He did it. In person. Putting in, you know, actual work and character studies.
Since you mentioned love, I have a question for you:
Would people still make AI videos of him like this if the attention economy didn’t exist or clicks wouldn’t generate money?
> But shazbot to anyone who goes rule 34 on him.
I hate to break it to you, but I think the genie from Aladdin counts.
The irony here is that this article is now a giant invitation to everyone else who just found out about this to pile on and do the exact opposite
It's called the Streisand effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
It's actually not the Streisand effect. The Streisand effect is about trying to smother a controversy and, in the process, breathing life into it.
Zelda is not exercising power or suppressing a controversy. This is just old fashioned dickheadedness. A generous interpretation would be juvenile trolling since they know their mark is vulnerable.
Typically a Streisand effect involves filing a lawsuit to try to stop something, which then raises awareness more broadly and makes the problem you’re suing to correct worse. In the canonical example, it’s “everyone stop taking pictures of my house!”, now pictures of your house are everywhere.
With a reasonably more generous definition, this case can indeed be considered a Streisand effect, if the problem gets worse by calling attention to it because now more idiots know about it. But a lawsuit would seal the deal!
Yeah, if you’re a complete sociopath.
Not necessarily, anonymity enables a lot of interesting behaviors. I see it all the time on HN.