As a fan of his work, I too wish it all to stop. People always go headlong for the people who we all miss the most, yet don't understand that it was their underlying humanity that made them so special.
And even if this were a viable answer: legal process _where_? What's to stop these "creators" from simply doing their computation in a different jurisdiction?
We need systems that work without this one neat authoritarian trick. If your solution requires that you lean on the violence of the state, it's unlikely to be adopted by the internet.
Also, calling legal enforcement as “leaning on the violence of the state” is hyperbolic and a false dichotomy. Every system of rights for and against companies (contracts, privacy, property, speech) comes down to enforceable legal policies.
Examples of cases that have shaped society: Brown v Board of Ed, pollution lawsuits against 3M and Dow Chemical, Massachusetts v. EPA resulted in the clean air act, DMCA, FOSTA-SESTA, the EU Right to Be Forgotten, Reno v. ACLU which outlined speech protections online, interracial marriage protected via Loving v. Virginia, the ruling that now requires police have a warrant to access cell phone data was Carpenter v. US, and these are just a few!
> And even if this were a viable answer: legal process _where_? What's to stop these "creators" from simply doing their computation in a different jurisdiction?
Jurisdictional challenges don't mean a law is pointless. Yes, bad actors can operate from other jurisdictions, but this is true for all transnational issues, from hacking to human smuggling to money laundering. DMCA takedowns work globally, as does GDPR for non-EU companies.
Nobody’s arguing for blind criminalization or over policing AI. But perhaps there should be some legal frameworks to protect safe and humane use.
Her goal seems to be to reduce the role in her life played by AI slop portrayals of her dad. Taking the legal route seems like it would do the opposite.
But that shouldn’t be the first step. Telling your fellow man “what you are doing is bothering me, please stop” is significantly simpler, faster, and cheaper than contacting lawyers and preparing for a possibly multi-year case where all the while you’ll have to be reminded and confronted with the very thing you don’t want to deal with.
If asking doesn’t work, then think of other solutions.
Like if nothing sparked the World Wars (conversely: or if Hitler won). Or Greece harnessed steam or electricity to spur an industrial revolution 2200 years ago. Or if Christianity etc. never caught on.
It's not because just telling people on the internet to stop doing something doesn't actually stop them from doing it. This is basic internet 101, streissand effect at full power
So I don't think there was actually malicious intent and asking people to stop will probably work.
The most these lawsuits could hope to do is generate publicity, which would likely just encourage more people to send her videos. This direct plea has that risk too, but I think "please don't do this" will feel a lot less adversarial and more genuine to most people than "it should be illegal for you to do this".
It's not fruitless and doesn't only generate publicity. Some states like California and Indiana recognize and protect the commercial value of a person's name, voice, image, and likeness after death for 70 years, which in this case would apply for Robin William's daughter.
Tupac's estate successfully sued Drake to take his AI generated voice of Tupac out of his Kendrick Lamar diss track.
There is going to be a deluge of copyright suits against OpenAI for their videos of branded and animated characters. Disney just sent a cease and desist to Character.ai last week for using copyrighted characters without authorization.
The problem she wants to solve is "people are sending me AI videos of my dad". She will not have any success solving this problem using lawsuits, even if the lawsuits themselves succeed in court.
1. Whether there is an effective legal framework that prevents AI companies from generating the likenesses of real people.
2. The shared cultural value that, this is not cool actually, not respectful, and in fact somewhat ghoulish.
Establishing a cultural value is probably more important than any legal structures.
If AI somehow allowed me to create videos of the likeness of Isaac Newton or George Washington, that seems far less a concern because they are long dead and none of their grieving family is being hurt by the fakes.
Since the raise of generative AI we have seen all sorts of pathetic usages, like "reviving" assesinated people and making them speak to the alleged killer in court, training LLMs to mimic deseased loved ones, generative nudification, people that is not using their brain anymore because they need to ask ChatGPT/Grok... some of them are crimes, others not. Regardless most of them should stop.
Robin Williams' daughter is wise to avoid creating a "Williams Effect".