You cannot tackle the dead. But that doesn’t mean you have to deepfakes. | Techcrunch

Zelda Williams, daughter of the late actor Robin Williams, has a moving message for the fans of her father.

“Please stop sending AI videos from Dad. Stop believing that I want to see if I will understand. I will not do that and I will not do that either,” she wrote in a post on her Instagram story on Monday. “If you have any decency, stop this to him and me, even everyone, point out. It is stupid, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s not what he would like.”

It is probably no coincidence that Williams posted this message just a few days after the release of OpenAi’s Sora 2 video model and the social app Sora, which gives users the opportunity to generate very realistic deep fakes of themselves, their friends and certain cartoon characters.

That also applies to dead people, who are apparently an honest game, because it is It is not illegal to listen to the deceasedAccording to the Press Law Center student.

Sora doesn’t let you make videos of living people – unless it’s yours, or from a friend who has given you permission to use their image (or ‘cameo’, as OpenAi calls it). But these limits do not apply to the dead, which can usually be generated without roadblocks. The app, which is still only available through invitation, is flooded with videos from historical figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, but also from deceased celebrities such as Bob Ross, John Lennon, Alex Trebek and yes, Robin Williams.

How OpenAi draws the border when generating videos of the dead is unclear. Sora 2, for example, will not produce former President Jimmy Carter, who died in 2024, or Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, although it did make videos with the parable of Robin Williams, who died in 2014, according to the Techcrunch tests. And although the cameo function of OpenAI enables people to set instructions for how they appear in videos that make others of it (guardrails that arose in response to early criticism of Sora), the deceased have nothing to say about that. I bet Richard Nixon would turn around in his grave if he saw the deepfake that I made of him in which he argued for the abolition of the police.

OpenAi did not respond to TechCrunch’s request to comment on the permissibility of the deep fakes of dead people. However, it is possible that the deep fakes of dead celebrities such as Williams fall within the acceptable practices of the company; legal precedent shows That the company would probably not be held liable for the defamation of the deceased.

“To see how the inheritances of real people are condensed to ‘this looks like and sounds vaguely on them, so that is enough’, so that other people can make terrible tap doll games, is mad,” Williams wrote.

The critics of OpenAi accuse the company to use a rapid and loose approach to such issues. That is why Sora was quickly flooded with AI clips of copyrighted characters such as Peter Griffin and Pikachu after the release. CEO Sam Altman originally said that Hollywood studios and agencies should explicitly unsubscribe if they do not want their IP to be recorded in videos generated by Sora. The Motion Picture Association has already called on OpenAi to take action in this area. to declare In a statement that “the established copyright legislation protects the rights of makers and applies here.” Since then he has said that the company will reverse this position.

Sora is perhaps the most dangerous AI model suitable for deep-fake that has been accessible to people so far, given how realistic the results are. Other platforms such as Xai are left behind, but have even fewer crash barriers than Sora, making it possible to generate pornographic material Deepfakes of real people. While other companies catch up open, we will create a horrible precedent if we treat real people – alive or death – as our own personal toys.