Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late actor Robin Williams, has a gripping message to his father’s fans.
“Please just stop sending me AI videos of dad. Stop believing I will see it or as I will understand. I don’t, and I won’t,” she wrote in a post about her Instagram story on Monday. “If you have any decency, just stop doing this against him and for me, to everyone, full stop. It’s mute, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, that’s not what he wanted.”
It is probably not a coincidence that Williams was moved to placing this just days after the release of Openais Sora 2 video model and Sora Social App, which gives users the power to generate very realistic deepfaks of themselves, their friends and certain cartoon characters.
It also includes dead people who are apparently fair play because it is not illegal to dampen the deceased, according to Student Press Law Center.
Sora will not let you generate videos of living people – unless it is of yourself, or a friend who has given you permission to use their equality (or “como” as Openai calls it). But these boundaries do not apply to the dead, which can mostly be generated without roadblocks. The app, which is still only available through invitation, has been flooded with videos of historical characters such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, as well as deceased celebrities such as Bob Ross, John Lennon, Alex Trebek and yes, Robin Williams.
How Openai draws the line on generating videos of the dead is unclear. For example, Sora 2 will not generate former President Jimmy Carter, who died in 2024, or Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, although it created videos with resemblance to Robin Williams, who died in 2014, according to Techcrunch’s tests. And while Openai’s CAMEO feature allows people to set instructions on how they appear in videos, others generate from them – protective frames that came in response to early criticism of Sora – the deceased has nothing like that. I bet Richard Nixon would roll around in his grave if he could see the deep pad I made of him advocating for police abolition.

Openai did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on the permission of in -headed dead people. However, it is possible that deep -fishing dead celebrities such as Williams are within the acceptable practice of the company; Legal precedent shows that the company would probably not be held liable for the deceased defamation.
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“Seeing the legacy of real people condensed down to” This guard looks and sounds like them, so it’s enough, “just so other people can wipe out horrible Tiktok -slop -doll that is crazy,” Williams wrote.
Openai’s critics accuse the company of taking a quick-and-loose approach to such issues, and that is why Sora was quickly flooded with AI clips of copyrighted characters such as Peter Griffin and Pikachu at the time of release. CEO Sam Altman initially said that Hollywood Studios and Agencies would have to explicitly opt out if they did not want their IP to be included in Sora-generated videos. Motion Picture Association has already called on Openai to intervene in this question and is declared in a statement that “well-established copyright law protects the rights of creators and applies here.” He has since said that the company will turn this position.
Sora is perhaps the most dangerous deep phase-capable AI model available to humans so far, considering how realistic its output is. Other platforms like XAI delay back, but have even fewer protective frames than Sora, making it possible to generate pornographic deepfakes of real people. When other companies catch up with Openai, we will set a terrible precedent if we treat real people – alive or dead – like our own personal toys.
