You can’t libel the dead. But that doesn’t mean you should deepfake them.

Summary

Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor Robin Williams, has a poignant message for her father’s fans. “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand. I don’t and I won’t,” she wrote in a post on her Instagram story on Monday. “If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.” It’s probably not a coincidence that Williams was moved to post this just days after the release of OpenAI’s Sora 2 video model and Sora social app, which gives users the power to generate highly realistic deepfakes of themselves, their friends, and certain cartoon characters. That also includes dead people, who are seemingly fair game because it is not illegal to libel the deceased, according to the Student Press Law Center. Sora will not let you generate videos of living people — unless if it is of yourself, or a friend who has given you permission to use their likeness (or “cameo,” as OpenAI calls it). But these limits don’t apply to the dead, who can mostly be generated without roadblocks. The app, which is still only available via invite, has been flooded with videos of historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon, as well as deceased celebrities like Bob Ross, John Lennon, Alex Trebek, and yes, Robin Williams. How OpenAI draws the line on generating videos of the dead is unclear. Sora 2 won’t, for example, generate former President Jimmy Carter, who died in 2024, or Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, though it did create videos with the likeness of Robin Williams, who died in 2014, according to TechCrunch’s tests. And while OpenAI’s cameo feature allows people to set instructions for how they appear in videos others generate of them — guardrails that came in response to early criticism of Sora — the deceased have no such say. I’ll bet Richard Nixon would ...