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We’ve been covering the copyright lawsuits being filed by authors who didn’t consent to tech companies using their works to train AI programs. It can hard trying to follow how the AI programs operate (especially when said programs are named after animals, like LLaMA). Understanding the infringement issues through the lens of actors makes it a bit easier to understand. Zelda Williams has just described what it’s like to hear AI recreate the voice of her father, the late-great Robin Williams. I think we can all understand on a primal level the supreme ick factor, not to mention moral failing, of AI playing at being someone’s dearly-departed relation. More on what Zelda posted to Instagram on Sunday:
Artificial intelligence has a lot of potential uses, and abuses, such as recreating the image or voice of a person without their consent — which is one of the issues at the heart of the ongoing actors’ strike.
Zelda Williams understandably has some opinions on this — as her dad was the often imitated, never duplicated Robin Williams — and she weighed in on the practice of AI recreations, calling them “disturbing.”
“I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI,” Williams wrote via her Instagram Story on Sunday. “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.”
Robin Williams, an Oscar-winning actor and comedian known for his improvisational skills and characterizations, died by suicide in 2014.
“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,” she continued. “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.”
SAG-AFTRA made AI recreations of an actor’s image or voice — including “the use of performer’s voice, likeness or performance to train an artificial intelligence system designed to generate new visual, audio, or audiovisual content” — as “a mandatory subject of bargaining.”
The subject is a hot button topic in Hollywood, with Tim Burton comparing AI recreations to “a robot taking your humanity, your soul.” In support of the actors’ strike, John Cusack called AI a “criminal enterprise.” And on Saturday, Tom Hanks warned of an AI video of himself promoting a dental plan.
“These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of great people,” Williams concluded, “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.”
Zelda is really well spoken here, as she’s been for years. She’s managed to eschew the main nepo baby conversations, I think probably because she’s shifted her focus from acting to directing. Her next project, Lisa Frankenstein, is a horror-comedy that will be her feature-length debut, and it’s written by Diablo Cody. (Ok, so she’s still getting a bit of a nepo bump.) I guess she had the film on her mind when she called AI at its worst “a horrendous Frankensteinian monster.” Still true, though! And speaking of, it wasn’t just Tom Hanks over the weekend that got scammed. Gayle King also had to warn people that rogue AI was responsible for a video of her touting weight loss products. A huge chunk of celebs’ management budgets now are gonna be allocated for lawyers playing whack-a-mole with all these fake AI videos. The WGA felt that they secured adequate protections from AI in their new deal; we’ll see how SAG-AFTRA builds on that in their negotiations with AMPTP.
Photos credit: Derek Ross/Avalon and Getty
