Robin Williams' children revived his Instagram to fight AI fakes of his voice and face
The account had been dormant since 2014. Zelda Williams said the deepfakes were maddening.
Zak, Zelda and Cody Williams revived their father's Instagram account on Monday, twelve years after Robin Williams died. The page had been silent since 2014. In a joint statement they said they wanted it to be "a safe, trusted place" for stories, photos and videos that actually belong to him, as they mark what would have been his 75th year.
Zelda, posting separately, apologised in case seeing the old page active again felt "triggering." She wrote that turning it into a home for authentic clips was "one of the best ways we've now found to fight back against rampant AI abuse of his voice and likeness on here." She added, "Might be a drop in the bucket, but we're trying."
This is not her first attempt to draw a line. Last October she asked people to stop sending her AI videos of her father. "It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want." She has called the output "gross" and "maddening," and compared it to "disgusting, over-processed hotdogs" made from the lives of actual people. During the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike she described the recreations as, at worst, a "horrendous Frankensteinian monster."
Dead celebrities have become raw material. If a model can approximate a voice and a face, someone will post the result, and someone else will like it. Estates can send takedowns forever and still lose. The Williams children are trying a different tactic: put the real archive where the fakes already live, and hope the verified account is the one people find first.
I am not sure that works at feed scale. A family Instagram is not a filter, and the platforms have not shown much interest in being one. But it is a clearer answer than silence, which is what the account had been since 2014, while the slop kept arriving in Zelda's DMs.
The siblings have pointed the profile at TikTok, Facebook and YouTube as well. Whether authentic clips can outrun generated ones is an open question, and it will not be answered this week. Williams' work is still circulating among people who never saw him alive. That is the audience the fakes are built for.