Robin Williams' Daughter Pleads for People to Stop Sending AI Videos of Her Dad

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.

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.

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".

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.

So I don't think there was actually malicious intent and asking people to stop will probably work.

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.

Robin Williams' daughter is wise to avoid creating a "Williams Effect".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

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.

"Technology is neutral" is a cop-out and should be seen as such. People should, at the very least, try to ask how people / society will make use of a technology and ask whether it should be developed/promoted.

We are all-too-often over-optimistic about how things will be used or position them being used in the best possible light rather than being realistic in how things will be used.

In a perfect world, people might only use AI responsibly and in ways that largely benefit mankind. We don't live in that perfect world, and it is/was predictable that AI would be used in the worst ways more than it's used in beneficial ones.

1) Rolling coal. It's hard for me to envision a publicly-available form of this technology that is virtuous. It sounds like it's mostly used to harass people and exert unmerited, abusive power over others. Hardly a morally-neutral technology.

2) Fentanyl. It surely has helpful uses, but maybe its misuse is so problematic that humanity might be significantly better off without the existence of this drug.

Maybe AI is morally neutral, but maybe it isn't.

I'm not implying those adjectives apply to AI, but merely presenting a worse case scenario.

Dismissing the question of "does this benefit us?" with "it's just a tool" evokes Jurassic Park for me.

Nuclear weapons just destroy stuff at scale, by design.

That's a very easy yes.

The machines didn't enslave anyone in this scenario. "Men with machines" did. I think of the techbro oligarchs who decide what a feed algorithm shows.

Dune's a wild ride man!

???

A thinking machine is a total unknown. If human intelligence and machine intelligence are not aligned, then what?

Hard disagree. Technology is a tool. Tools don’t do anything without a human in the loop, even if to initially run an autonomous system.

Even technology like guns and nukes are not inherently bad. Can we be trusted to behave ourselves with such tools? I would argue “no”.

> I welcome generative AI killing it off.

It probably will, but that pushes us in the direction that Neal Stephenson describes in Fall - millions of people sitting alone consuming slop content generated precisely for them, perfect neuro-stimulation with bio-feedback, just consuming meaningless blinking lights all day and loving it. Is that better than what we have now? It's ad-absurdum, yes, but we live in a very absurd world now.

> Who cares what that generated character likes to eat for breakfast or who they are dating they don't exist.

You never needed to know this about celebrities, and you still don't need to now. Yes, others are into it; let them have their preferences. No doubt you're into something they would decry.