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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s never too late to start being a decent person to your fellow human.

Robin Williams himself famously did humorous impersonations of recently-deceased celebrities and politicians. He was an irreverent comedian. You guys need to relax.

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

It's called the Streisand effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

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.

Yeah, if you’re a complete sociopath.

Unfortunately, AI content creators have no shame, and neither do social media content curation algorithms; in the current configuration of the world, those two entities form a closed loop that produces and serves this shameful content to unwilling bystanders. From a God’s-eye perspective it is easy to say “we should change this system so this doesn’t happen”, but from within the system each participant can only say “let us follow our incentives to become slightly more rich than other participants” (and any entity that might’ve once held a God’s-eye view along with the power to make such a change has long since abdicated their role).

It is decent microcosm of the state of the world if you’re looking to understand why younger generations seem so fatalistically, nihilistically depressed - they are simply aware that nobody can break these vicious cycles.

This lady needs some proper advice on this. She is only digging this hole deeper by feeding it attention.