So Zelda Williams is out here telling people to stop making AI deepfakes of her dead father, and honestly, good for her. Takes guts to stand up and say “hey, maybe don’t puppet my dad’s corpse for TikTok clout” in a world where we’ve collectively decided that basic human decency is negotiable.
But what really got me was her metaphor. She called these AI recreations “disgusting, over-processed hotdogs” made from the lives of human beings, and Christ, that’s perfect. That’s the whole goddamn game right there, isn’t it? We’re living in the age of content slurry, where everything gets ground up, processed, and extruded into whatever shape gets the most engagement.
You want to know what’s really messed up? The people sending her these videos probably think they’re doing something nice. Like, “Oh, you must miss your dad, here’s a computer-generated facsimile of him saying words he never said doing things he never did. You’re welcome!” That’s the level of emotional intelligence we’re working with here. It’s like showing up to a funeral with a mannequin dressed in the deceased’s clothes and wondering why everyone’s upset.
And before anyone gets on their high horse about me being a Luddite or whatever – I’m not against technology. Hell, I spend half my life writing about this stuff. But there’s a difference between using tools to create something new and using tools to desecrate something that already existed. Robin Williams was a human being with a specific voice, specific mannerisms, specific genius that came from somewhere deep and unreplicable. You can’t just feed that into a machine and expect to get anything but a sad echo.
The thing that kills me is how these deepfake enthusiasts act like they’re artists. Like they’re the new vanguard of creativity. Brother, you typed a prompt into a computer and waited for it to vomit out some pixels. That’s not art. That’s playing with a very expensive toy. Real art requires something that machines fundamentally lack – the ability to suffer, to question, to doubt yourself at three in the morning while you’re trying to figure out if what you’re making means anything at all.
Zelda called it “the Human Centipede of content,” which is another brilliant metaphor that’s going to haunt me for weeks. Because that’s exactly what it is, isn’t it? We’re at the end of the line, consuming content that’s been processed through so many algorithmic guts that it barely resembles anything human anymore. And the folks at the front of the line – the tech companies, the AI developers, the venture capitalists – they’re laughing all the way to the bank while we fight over the scraps.
Here’s what really gets me though: nobody asked for this. Nobody was sitting around thinking, “You know what would make my life better? If I could watch a computer-generated version of a dead comedian doing stuff he never did.” This is a solution in search of a problem, except the only problem it solves is “how can we generate infinite content without paying actual human creators?”
And the kicker? They call it “the future.” Like it’s inevitable. Like we’re all supposed to just accept that this is where we’re headed and resistance is futile. Zelda’s right to push back on that language. AI isn’t the future, it’s just a really expensive way of recycling the past. It’s plagiarism with extra steps and a better PR team.
I’ve seen people defend this stuff by saying it’s just for fun, it’s not hurting anyone, lighten up. But that’s horseshit. It IS hurting people. It’s hurting Zelda Williams every time someone sends her a video of her dead father’s face pasted onto some AI-generated nonsense. It’s hurting the actors who are watching their likenesses get stolen and repurposed without consent. It’s hurting the concept of human creativity itself by suggesting that art is just a pattern that can be identified and reproduced.
The porn stuff is bad enough – Scarlett Johansson and countless other actors having their faces grafted onto pornographic videos without consent. The scam ads are worse – using dead celebrities to peddle erectile dysfunction pills or cryptocurrency schemes. But somehow, the “innocent” entertainment deepfakes might be the most insidious, because they normalize the whole grotesque process. They make it seem harmless, playful even.
OpenAI’s response to all this is predictably useless. “Oh, you can flag copyright infringement using our form.” Great. So the burden is on the victims to constantly police the internet for unauthorized uses of their or their loved ones’ likenesses. That’ll work out well. It’s like telling someone their house is on fire and handing them a water pistol.
No blanket opt-out either. You have to play whack-a-mole with each individual infringement, filing forms, waiting for responses, while the content keeps spreading. By the time one video gets taken down, fifty more have popped up. It’s the Sisyphean nightmare of the digital age.
What’s wild to me is how quickly we went from “wow, this technology is impressive” to “let’s use it to desecrate the dead for clicks.” Took us about five minutes. That’s humanity for you. Give us any tool and we’ll immediately figure out the worst possible use for it.
And the people making this stuff, they’ll tell you they’re just experimenting, just exploring the boundaries of what’s possible. But possibility isn’t the same as permissibility. Just because you CAN make a deepfake of Robin Williams doing whatever doesn’t mean you SHOULD. That’s the kind of basic ethical reasoning we used to teach to children, but apparently it gets lost somewhere around the time you download your first AI app.
The worst part is that Robin Williams was one of the good ones. A genuinely talented performer who brought joy to millions of people. And now he can’t even rest in peace without being turned into content slop by people who mistake computation for creativity. It’s disrespectful to his memory, to his family, to the actual work he did while he was alive.
Zelda said this isn’t what he’d want, and she’s right. Robin Williams was about spontaneity, humanity, the raw edge of live performance. The idea of reducing that to an algorithm, to a model trained on his old performances, would have disgusted him. He knew the difference between real connection and fake bullshit. He spent his whole career trying to create the former.
Look, I get it. People miss Robin Williams. He died too young, too tragically. There’s a natural desire to have more of him, to hear that voice again, to see that manic energy. But the solution isn’t to create a digital zombie that shambles around the internet performing tricks for strangers. The solution is to appreciate what he actually made, what he actually gave us, and let that be enough.
Because in the end, that’s all any of us get. Our time here, the work we do, the connections we make. You can’t extend that with technology. You can only cheapen it. And feeding someone’s life into an AI model to create an endless stream of fake content isn’t honoring their memory – it’s pissing on their grave.
So yeah, listen to Zelda Williams. Stop making AI videos of her dead father. Stop sending them to her. Stop pretending you’re doing something creative or meaningful or fun. You’re just making hotdogs out of a human being, and nobody wants to eat that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a drink. This whole topic has me feeling like I need to disinfect my brain.