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Posted by CharlesW 15 hours ago

Robin Williams' Daughter to Fans Creating AI Videos: 'Have Some Shame'(variety.com)
92 points | 59 commentspage 2
moomoo11 14 hours ago|
[flagged]
bredren 13 hours ago||
Bob Barker and Wilford Brimley both took it pretty hard on Sora.

I don't remember seeing any RW content, but there was some John Lennon stuff. He was mostly in good taste, but I remember seeing something and being, uncomfortable with it.

I don't really see why Bob Barker should be any less protected, then John Lennon or Robin Williams. None of these people were saints.

But there is or at least used to be deference provided to certain people or establishments.

I haven't seen this video that was so upsetting, but perhaps it's not the reanimation so much as the content. Some of it is so obviously satire it's not to be taken seriously.

But, I remember somebody used Bruce Lee as a vessel to spread the gospel on Sora. I had to frown at that, as it was not how he would have behaved.

tene80i 13 hours ago|||
You seem to be trying to argue “this is actually fine” but what you’re actually saying is “I do not care what the family want, I will continue to enjoy the thing they hate”.

So… ok? You can go and knock over headstones in graveyards too. So what? It doesn’t prove anything except you’re a jackass.

If what you mean is “She is wrong to ask for this, our entertainment is more important than her grief”, then, well, I guess that’s an argument you can make, but you haven’t actually made the argument.

clipsy 14 hours ago|||
> both up and down votes prove me right.

No, they really don't.

moomoo11 13 hours ago||
it means both are correct stances to have, sorry it doesn't make sense to you
dghlsakjg 13 hours ago|||
Upvotes and downvotes do not give any validity to an argument.

Sorry it doesn’t make sense to you.

clipsy 13 hours ago|||
Feel free to ELI5, I'll be waiting with bated breath.
moomoo11 13 hours ago||
in my post i said:

i mean.. i get it. (point 1) i'd never do it. (point 2)

i also said, it is the internet and people will do that because famous people are... famous... and if there's an AI video of a famous person that I do like, i will give it a like.

if Robin Williams was some guy who worked as a cashier at Trader Joe's his whole life nobody would care

maybe Robin Williams should have never been an actor then he'd be unknown to the masses, like 99% of us on HN

clipsy 13 hours ago||
> i mean.. i get it. (point 1) i'd never do it. (point 2)

And?

> i also said, it is the internet and people will do that because famous people are... famous... and if there's an AI video of a famous person that I do like, i will give it a like.

Essentially: it happens a lot so it must be OK. Lovely morals.

> if Robin Williams was some guy who worked as a cashier at Trader Joe's his whole life nobody would care

People don't care about a random murder victim as much as they care about Rob Reiner; murder is still wrong and deplorable.

> maybe Robin Williams should have never been an actor then he'd be unknown to the masses, like 99% of us on HN

Whiny bullshit.

hn_throwaway_99 14 hours ago|||
> you're free to downvote me if you disagree, because either way, in this case both up and down votes prove me right.

incants magical spell so that I'm always right!

Checkmate atheists, or something.

popalchemist 14 hours ago||
yes, AND, if your father was dead and people were desecrating him daily, would this "logic" of yours stop you from feeling that saying something is appropriate?

(No. Come on.)

moomoo11 13 hours ago||
i see AI edits of living people like sama or dario every day, various politicians, actors from various movies, etc.

i see AI edits of people who aren't here anymore like that guy charlie kirk or george floyd (to pick examples from "both" sides), i saw ai edits of alan rickman (guy who played Snape in happy Potter), and there are edits of napoleon or others.

if my dad was a famous actor known by literally 100s of millions of people, that was my dad's choice to bring that on himself. just being real.

people trying to compel other people is just an L take

ElProlactin 13 hours ago|||
> i see AI edits of living people like sama or dario every day, various politicians, actors from various movies, etc.

If you're consuming "AI edits" of Sam and Dario "every day", that explains a lot about your comments here.

popalchemist 13 hours ago||||
The difference here is he committed suicide, so it is obviously extremely triggering for his daughter to see him saying random (often racist or otherwise created for shock value) trash content as if he's still alive.

You have low empathy, in case you didn't know.

zulux 13 hours ago||
I'm Lutheran, and we take a very dim view of suicide.

However, RW was going through hell on earth with his diagnoses and the progression of this disease. Many of us don't view what he did as a willful destruction of the life that God gave him.

Barbing 13 hours ago||||
Where are you seeing AI edits?
clipsy 13 hours ago|||
So your worldview boils down to: if something happens a lot, it can't be bad?
zergrush 14 hours ago||
The irony here is that this article is now a giant invitation to everyone else who just found out about this to pile on and do the exact opposite
kkotak 13 hours ago||
It's called the Streisand effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
willis936 13 hours ago||
It's actually not the Streisand effect. The Streisand effect is about trying to smother a controversy and, in the process, breathing life into it.

Zelda is not exercising power or suppressing a controversy. This is just old fashioned dickheadedness. A generous interpretation would be juvenile trolling since they know their mark is vulnerable.

cobbzilla 13 hours ago||
Typically a Streisand effect involves filing a lawsuit to try to stop something, which then raises awareness more broadly and makes the problem you’re suing to correct worse. In the canonical example, it’s “everyone stop taking pictures of my house!”, now pictures of your house are everywhere.

With a reasonably more generous definition, this case can indeed be considered a Streisand effect, if the problem gets worse by calling attention to it because now more idiots know about it. But a lawsuit would seal the deal!

sph 11 hours ago||
Yeah, if you’re a complete sociopath.
zergrush 11 hours ago||
Not necessarily, anonymity enables a lot of interesting behaviors. I see it all the time on HN.
delichon 14 hours ago|
I remember being stunned by Mork from Ork. Then watched as the same guy grew into one of the most iconic and loved humans on Earth. Given the amount of brain share that he earned it's kind of inevitable that so many people try to bring him back. I hope his daughter can also feel the love in it.

But shazbot to anyone who goes rule 34 on him.

willis936 13 hours ago||
There's a few different ways to look at this.

1. You appreciate Robin Williams and were he here right now judging you for how you honor his memory, would he approve?

2. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then if he were would he approve of you bringing pain to someone he loved dearly? Why would you do that to Robin Williams?

3. Robin Williams is not here, or anywhere, so then nothing matters and I bet I could get some views.

It's difficult to see love in these acts when they seem to be fundamentally selfish. Not at all what Robin Williams would do.

delichon 13 hours ago|||
"Love is the most selfish of all the passions." — Alexandre Dumas
_HMCB_ 13 hours ago||||
Perfectly stated. Thank you.
echelon 13 hours ago||||
Should one not be free to invoke the visages of Einstein, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ (whichever version - and there are so many!), Genghis Khan, Confucius, et al.?

What about when poking fun at Hitler, such as Kung Fury and Jojo Rabbit do? Off limits?

Can one paint Bob Ross in a sci-fi setting? Is that unethical? Is it okay so long as a "real" artist does it and not an "AI artist"? Or can we seriously never depict him again because someone might get angry?

"Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater"?

Come on!

And we can't animate Bruce Lee? Or put him on stickers? Or have him in new movies? (Nevermind how Quentin Tarantino did him wrong.)

When I grew up Elvis effigies were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The people who liked this stuff are mostly dead or retired now so you don't see it as much, but it used to be a big deal. Really big deal.

So we can't do that anymore?

Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires for Christ's sake...

willis936 13 hours ago||
I'm glad you're asking. If you notice no one has said, especially Zelda, that you can't do these things. Obviously you can. You have access to a computer. The question you should be asking is should you do these things?

Also, this a good list of false equivalences. Robin Williams, when public, was empathetic, emotional, and arguably humanist. His memory isn't a caricature from people who have never known him, as you would see from Star Trek holo-deck episodes featuring Leonardo Da Vanci. His memory is something that is deeply important to people who are living. Some of those people simply appreciated his art and his behavior. One of those people is his daughter. You don't get to say what is right or wrong here. No one's going to stop you if you want to make a video of Robin Williams taking the Siegfried Oath, but you should understand why it is wrong.

conductr 12 hours ago|||
Doesn’t the should part just completely ignore how we all know the world actually works which is kind of its own form of insanity. We humans can’t be trusted to follow basic rules like traffic laws. Right and wrong cease to matter much when 1) I want to be selfish and do what I please and 2) there’s technically nobody being harmed, feelings aside. But even then, from a net perspective, there’s probably many more people getting enjoyment from these AI videos than the people who are saddened by them.

It sucks for Zelda this saddens her so much, but if I were in her shoes it’s something I know I can’t control and so I’d try to embrace or ignore it.

necovek 11 hours ago||
Haven't seen the videos, but she seems to complain of videos claiming to be authentic private videos of him stating a particular political message — and of these videos being forwarded to her (possibly for verification?).

This has nothing to do with impersonating a deceases person but about rewriting (personal) history she finds shameful.

echelon 10 hours ago|||
> should you do these things?

Emphatically yes.

Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.

One day you won't even think about it. Well, your descendants won't. The aversion dies with you.

Squeamishness over thinking and speaking is pretty rare. Visual creation is just a new dimension of our conversation, and it'll be as accessible and common as writing words down.

You know the old generation called the world wide web satanic? They died and we stopped worrying about it.

csallen 1 hour ago|||
> Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.

I think you're the only person here who really gets it.

We already have dozens of methods commonly used for preserving/impersonating/representing people who aren't in the room, and who are possibly deceased. These mediums have evolved over time, from spoken word and song and music, to scribbles and drawings and painting and sculptures, to acting and plays, to writing and printing, to audio and video, to computerized media, to AI-generated computerized media.

Of course any medium can be used tastefully or distastefully. But what the people in this comment section are overwhelmingly reacting to (and attempting to moralize) is their distaste for the medium itself. Distaste for a new medium is extremely common throughout history, and if history is any indication, this distaste tends to disappear quickly as older generations die and are replaced by newer generations for whom this "newfangled contraption" feels like a natural part of the world.

card_zero 9 hours ago|||
I quite like truth, don't you? Or are you not a fan of it?

I mean I quite like jokes, metaphor, and libel, but one should probably have some restraint, details TBD.

echelon 8 hours ago||
Let's take speech away from people because they can't handle the freedom, then?
card_zero 5 hours ago||
What should you not do here doesn't mean what will we stop you doing. It just means what's the wrong thing to do?

Maybe you're worrying about social pressure? I can see how general agreement that it's wrong to do XYZ can lead to forcibly preventing anybody at all from doing XYZ.

Invictus0 13 hours ago||||
These arguments seem so quaint, like reading a letter from WW2. We live in the AI age! Wake up people, these things are happening and will not ever stop, we are not going back.
bigstrat2003 13 hours ago|||
No. Just because lots of people do a thing does not make it acceptable, and "people are going to keep doing it" is not a valid reason to not try to stop it.
Invictus0 3 hours ago||
See the war on drugs
sublinear 13 hours ago||||
Someone in the past probably said something similar:

"glove slap I demand satisfaction. Pistols at dawn. This is how we settle problems and there's no going back now." God made man and Colt made them equal, yes?

The current usage of AI is similarly unrefined and out of hand.

EA-3167 13 hours ago|||
It’s never too late to start being a decent person to your fellow human.
briansm 10 hours ago||
Lol, a couple of years go, grown men were getting into fist-fights over toilet paper and it's looking like they are about to wage war over a tank of juice.
csallen 13 hours ago|||
Robin Williams himself famously did humorous impersonations of recently-deceased celebrities and politicians. He was an irreverent comedian. You guys need to relax.
EA-3167 13 hours ago|||
Yeah… he did them. He didn’t tell a computer to mock up a realdoll of them and share it for clicks.
troupo 12 hours ago|||
Yes. He did it. In person. Putting in, you know, actual work and character studies.
geraneum 13 hours ago|||
Since you mentioned love, I have a question for you:

Would people still make AI videos of him like this if the attention economy didn’t exist or clicks wouldn’t generate money?

sublinear 12 hours ago|||
> But shazbot to anyone who goes rule 34 on him.

I hate to break it to you, but I think the genie from Aladdin counts.

darig 13 hours ago||
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