Actor-comedian Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams has reacted to the usage of AI to recreate her late father’s voice, saying that she finds it extremely disturbing.
Taking to her Instagram stories, Zelda wrote a lengthy statement saying: “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. This isn’t theoretical, it is very very real.”
She continued: “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.”
Concluding her post, she wrote: “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.”
Using AI to recreate old voices in their prime form is nothing new as this has already been done several times before. One of the best examples for this was using the voice of actor James Earl Jones to recreate the old voice for Darth Vader in the ‘Star Wars’ series ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’.
James had given away the rights for his Darth to be used without his consent as he was too old to re-do the iconic voice.
One of the primary reasons for the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes and the recently concluded WGA strikes was the overuse of AI in everything, particularly by the AMPTP.
The WGA upon conclusion of their strike made a deal with the AMPTP (Association of Motion Pictures and Television Producers) while SAG-AFTRA will retake negotiations with studios next week.
