🎭 Robin Williams’ Instagram vs. AI
The children of actor Robin Williams (Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, Bicentennial Man) have decided to reactivate his Instagram account with one singular purpose in mind: serving as an online authenticity checker when AI deepfakes of their father pop up online.
“As we recognize what would be our Dad’s 75th year, we’re grateful to see new generations discovering his work while longtime fans continue to celebrate the joy he brought into their lives. As technology evolves, we want this to be a safe, trusted place where the stories, photos, videos, and memories shared reflect his legacy with authenticity, warmth, and care,” reads the message from Zak, Zelda, & Cody Williamson Robin Williams’ Instagram account. “This is our way of sharing his unique talent and humor with the world, including the moments that made us and so many of you laugh, as we remember our Dad’s extraordinary life and work. He continues to inspire us and delight people all over the world.”
Zelda Williams first expressed her distaste for the numerous AI deepfakes of her father appearing online when she posted a message on her personal Instagram account in 2025 in response to the now-defunct Sora app creations from users. “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t,” wrote Zelda. “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. 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.”
Social Proof vs. AI: The big question is: Will this approach work? Is establishing a social media account where people can check the authenticity of a new viral video or image of a celebrity or public figure enough to push back against potentially damaging or simply inaccurate AI-produced replications of a person’s face, video, or audio? We’re still in mostly unexplored territory, and even the newest laws, like the Take It Down Act, generally only address deepfake porn or advertising disclosures. (The No Fake Act has still not been passed into law.)
Therefore, in these early days, as AI laws are still evolving, I think that the Williams family approach might actually be one of the best techniques for addressing online AI fakes. Yes, it adds work and maintenance to your plate, especially if you’re not fond of social media noise, but at this point, it may be a necessary evil until AI laws catch up to the speed of social media clout chasing.
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✍️ Sorkin on AI: Humans Are the Thing
“I have a very optimistic view of our future with AI. And here’s why: I don’t think it’s going to work…If you ask someone who plays Call of Duty, they’ll tell you they don’t have any emotional connection to the people that they’re shooting at all. That would be your experience watching AI [generated] Schindler’s List… You can go into a movie theater not knowing the name of the person who directed it, the person who wrote it, the people who are in it, but we’re going to find out that it matters that they were people. That we are not going to feel a connection to computer-generated characters, dialogue, stories, paintings, songs.”
—Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter, The Social Network, The West Wing, The Social Reckoning
*Source: Esquire
🤖 Harvard Prof’s AI Shortcut Shines Spotlight on FT
The bar for what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to AI in journalism continues to be lowered, this time thanks to Harvard professor Ricardo Hausmann. The former Venezuelan government minister, who holds a PhD in Economics from Cornell University, submitted an opinion piece to The Financial Times this month criticizing President Trump’s tariff policy. The only problem is that what he turned in was actually AI-generated.
On August 13, Harvard student Alex Bronzini-Vender, who also happens to be a regular opinion writer at The Harvard Crimson, called out Hausmann’s article, writing, “Gotta be the worst AI slop I’ve seen in a major publication.” A day later, Michael Socolow, a professor at the University of Maine, wrote, “It’s going to be very difficult this academic year trying to encourage students to write persuasively with creativity, individuality, and style… when a star Econ professor at Harvard Kennedy School publishes such easily ID’ed AI slop in The Financial Times.” And then, a day after that, fellow Ivy League professor Brendan Nyhan from Dartmouth used Pangram to indicate that 71% of the article was AI-generated.
That weekend, the FT added an update to the article: “It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement. The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process.”
Is AI OK at FT? The AI-generated piece remains posted on The Financial Times site, despite seemingly violating the FT’s AI Principles. On the AI Principles page, the FT editors write that the publication “is committed to human-led journalism and the protection of our intellectual property, brand, and business.”
The Hausmann situation does present a new wrinkle in the ongoing AI writing series of mini-scandals in that it supposedly involves text that was indeed written by the author, just condensed using AI. Is that the same as a mostly AI-generated article? Some would argue no, which could be why the piece is still live on the FT’s website. Another reason the article is still live, with a disclaimer, could be due to one of the FT’s other stated AI Principles: “We will experiment with AI to assist journalists, such as in story discovery, to improve quality and accuracy, and to create secondary content with the appropriate disclosure.” So, if we take that last bit literally, it implies that creating “secondary content” with AI, for example, condensing your own work into a shorter version using AI, is perfectly fine.
That said, at least some of Hausmann’s more vocal colleagues from other institutions in the academy clearly disagree and have deemed the AI crunching of human work as “AI slop.” Hausmann, who is a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of the Harvard Growth Lab, has yet to comment publicly on the matter.
🎬 ByteDance Puts Hollywood AI Promise in Writing
Chinese social media and AI giant ByteDance has already made it difficult to generate AI versions of your favorite Hollywood characters and actors following the legal threats from studios after the release of Seedance 2.0 earlier this year. This week, the first Hollywood organization that kicked off the wave of legal threats against ByteDance, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), has signed a kind of peace treaty with the AI video platform maker.
“[This] agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry – and reinforces our commitment to protect creative content,” said MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin. “For the past several months, we have had constructive engagement with ByteDance to implement meaningful guardrails on Seedance and Seedream [the company’s AI image model], and this MOU reflects our shared determination to continue our work together to further fortify those guardrails.”
Hollywood vs. China AI Détente: The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlines how ByteDance will maintain guardrails on its Seedance and Seedream AI video tools, as well as their implementations in CapCut and TikTok. The MOU would seem to pave the way for Hollywood studios to adopt the new Seedance 2.5 without reservations now that the IP issue is seemingly out of the way. However, as with all things AI, creators always seem to find a way to produce what they want, either using open source tools or via smaller platforms with no MOU with Hollywood. So we’ll see fewer IP-infringing AI videos from Seedance users, but don’t expect AI fakes of your favorite Marvel characters and Academy Award-winning actors to completely disappear from social media. ✍︎red a long, boring documentary, may be asking too much of many users. ✍︎
MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.
Cover image: A scene from a Bicentennial Man via Columbia Pictures
