Have you ever been reading an interview—say, with Mrs. Doubtfire and Boy Meets World star Matthew Lawrence—and it all seems to be going okay? Like, standard Entertainment Weekly stuff: Lawrence talks about recently being on The Masked Singer, reminisces about Mrs. Doubtfire, reminisces about the ways Robin Williams would get really emphatic about how the 12-year-old Lawrence shouldn’t use drugs while they were hanging out on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire, etc. (Okay, that last one actually sounds a little… intense?) Then, you get to the final paragraph, and, bam! A real solid day ruiner of a quote: “Man, it’s a real shame that he’s not with us. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t hear his voice. I even wish, now with artificial intelligence, I kind of want to go to his family and be like, would you guys allow me to use his voice for some sort of creative expression? Because I hear it every day, in my head.”
Boy, that’s a stick jammed in the ol’ mental bike spokes, huh?
It will probably not shock you to learn, as a person living at least some part of their life on the internet, that Lawrence is not the first, or even probably the thousandth, person, to have that particular thought, i.e., “Boy, I bet Robin Williams’ incredibly vital energy and unique comedic talents could probably be replicated with AI!” In fact, it’s been so ubiquitous a yearning over the years that Williams’ daughter Zelda Williams had to put out a public statement all but begging people to stop back during the SAG-AFTRA strikes back in 2023, saying at the time that, “I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad… I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings… These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for.” (Williams was talking specifically about studios trying to use actors’ likenesses, but we can’t imagine she’s any warmer to the dozens of knock-off AI tools that have flooded the market since, and which purport to be able to “recreate” her father’s distinctive voice, among many others.)
All of which makes the idea of Lawrence—and we’re sure he was just spitballing, but the intent sounded weirdly specific—coming to Williams’ family and asking them to endorse his “creative expression” some blend of baffling and horrifying. Robin Williams was one of the most recorded human beings on the planet; his voice, from the histrionic heights of his stand-up, to the naturalistic vibes he brought to many of his best acting roles, is not in short supply. Don’t bug his family to “make” more of it, no matter how loving the intent; there are a million better ways to pay tribute to the man’s legacy.
