Williams did not pull any punches in her post. “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 continued, before making a rather colorful analogy. “You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”
While Williams didn’t mention him specifically, her comments come after Mrs. Doubtfire‘s Matthew Lawrence opined in July that it would be “so cool” to “do something really special” with the actor’s voice using AI. (He also made similar comments earlier this year.) Whatever that thing was would be “with the respect and with the OK” from Williams’ family, of course, but it doesn’t seem like he’ll be getting that any time soon. In another incisive metaphor, Williams likened the technology to “the Human Centipede of content,” writing in a separate story, “And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future.’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”
Williams has long railed against the use of AI to revivify not just her dad, but late actors in general. “I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI. I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad,” she posted in 2023. “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. Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance.”
She added, “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.”
