After the Hollywood industry on strike, after Peter Sarsgaard, best performer in Venice for his composition in Memory, it is the turn of the actress daughter of the late Robin Williams (The Circle of Dead Poets, Madame Doubtfire), who died in 2014, to step up to the plate to denounce the abusive use of artificial intelligence in the creative world, and particularly in the film creation process.
On October 1, via her Instagram account, Zelda Williams directly attacked all those, amateurs or sound professionals, who on the Web used programs designed specifically to reproduce her father’s voice. The diversion of her thoughts is particularly shocking in her eyes, as she writes bluntly in her message: “I heard an alleged voice of my father, artificially reproduced, saying things that did not belong to him. These crude imitations are at best pale photocopies of extraordinary people.
“Personally disturbed” by this abusive use of computer sound programs, which can now reproduce a voice, famous or not, in just a few seconds with a few simple parameters, Zelda Williams vehemently expressed what these new practices inspired in her: “These Digital plagiarism resembles a horrible Frankenstein’s monster created by the dregs of our profession. We have to defend ourselves against that.”
The Circle of Dead Poets by Peter Weir in 1989, with Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke…
This position taken by Robin Williams’ daughter should strengthen the strike movement in Hollywood which aims in particular to defend actors or dubbers threatened by AI software. Sure of the justice of her fight, she recalled at the end of her open letter: “I saw how certain people used AI to abuse actors like Dad who could no longer oppose it. All this is no longer speculation, it is a real and crucial problem.