Last week, the daughter of the late, great comedic actor Robin Williams felt compelled to tell bored, tone-deaf idiots to stop sending her A.I.-generated images of her father. In doing so, she perfectly and succinctly articulated how A.I. platforms like Sora 2 are often the playground of losers and mediocre humans.  

Williams’ daughter, Zelda Williams, is an up-and-coming film director and has clearly thought a lot about the nature of creativity. Therefore, when she took to Instagram to vent about the vacuous, slobbering, mouth-breathers who like to delude themselves into thinking they’re poignant or inventive by flooding her feed with A.I. muck — specifically with Robin’s likeness on it — Zelda was very detailed in her critique. 

“To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening,” Zelda wrote. “You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”

Preach, sister. 

And, it got even better. 

“And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it ‘the future,’ AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed,” she went on. “You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very, very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”

The same week that Zelda Williams was laying her argument out, California Governor Gavin Newsom was signing AB 2602 and AB 1836, which together will help performers safeguard their voices and likenesses against A.I. predation, at least when it comes to companies and individuals profiting off them.

These laws also, in theory, afford the same protections to the estates of dead performers. 

Fran Drescher, President of the Screen Actors Guild, pointed out that in some ways this milestone dates back to the recent Hollywood writers’ strike. 

“They say as California goes, so goes the nation!” Drescher said in a statement. 

It’s true that the Golden State is the biggest single media market in the nation, so AB 2602 and AB 1836 carry real weight. But when it comes to regular app users who aren’t seeking profit, but rather trying to alleviate insecurity about their own lack of abilities by cosplaying an actual creative person, there likely won’t be any laws on the horizon that can regulate such behavior outside of copyright enforcement. 

Or, hopefully, social norms. 

This is an opinion-based editorial by Sacramento News & Review.