We cannot defame the dead. But that doesn’t mean you should falsify them.

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

“Please, stop sending me Papa’s AI videos. Stop believing that I want to see it or that I will understand. I will not and I will not,” she wrote in a publication on her Instagram history on Monday. “If you have a little decency, stop doing this to him and me, everyone, the final point. It’s stupid, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, that’s not what he would like.”

It is probably not a coincidence if Williams was led to publish this only a few days after the release of the OPENAI SORA 2 video model and the Sora social application, which gives users the power to generate very realistic Deepfakes of themselves, their friends and certain cartoons.

This also includes deceased people, who seem to be a fair prey because it is not illegal to defame the deceased, according to the Student Press Law Center.

Sora will not allow you to generate videos of living people, unless it is yourself or 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 mostly be generated without roadblocks. The application, which is still only available by invitation, 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.

The way in which Openai sets the limit in terms of generation of videos of the dead is not clear. Sora 2 will not generate, for example, former president Jimmy Carter, who died in 2024, nor Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, although he created videos with the effigy of Robin Williams, who died in 2014, according to Techcrunch tests. And while Openai’s Camée function allows people to define instructions on how they appear in videos that others generate – safeguards in response to Sora’s first criticisms – the deceased have no say. I bet Richard Nixon would turn into his grave if he could see the Deepfake that I made of him in favor of the abolition of the police.

OPENAI did not respond to the request for comments from TechCrunch on the lawful degrees in depth. However, it is possible that the falsification of dead celebrities like Williams is in accordance with the acceptable practices of the company; The legal preceding shows that the company would probably not be held responsible for the defamation of the deceased.

“Seeing the heritage of real people condense themselves in” it looks vaguely like them, so that’s enough “, just for other people to produce horrible Tiktok slops by manipulating them is exasperating,” wrote Williams.

Openai’s criticisms accuse the company of adopting a rapid and loose approach on such questions, which is why Sora was quickly flooded with iA clips of characters protected by copyright like Peter Griffin and Pikachu when it was released. CEO Sam Altman had initially declared that Hollywood studios and agencies should explicitly unsubscribe if they did not want their IP address to be included in the videos generated by Sora. The motion Picture Association has already called Openai to act on this question, declaring in a press release that “a well -established law on copyright protects the rights of creators and applies here”. He has since declared that the company would return to this position.

Sora is, perhaps, the most dangerous AI model capable of Deepfake accessible to people so far, given the realism of its results. Other platforms like Xai are lagging behind, but have even less safeguards than Sora, which allows you to generate pornographic deepfakes from real people. As other companies make up for Openai, we will create a horrible previous one if we treat real people – living or dead – like our own personal toys.