You cannot honor the dead. But that doesn’t mean you need to make them deep.

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

“Send me the AI ​​video of your dad. Stop thinking I want to see it or I want to understand. “If you have any decency, tell him and me to stop doing this, even to everyone, full stop. It’s stupid, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, that’s not what he wants.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Williams was posted days after the release of Openai’s Sora 2 video model and Sora Social App.

According to the Student Press Law Center, it is not illegal to honor the deceased, so it includes dead people who are seemingly fair game.

Sora doesn’t let you generate your own videos – unless it’s you or you give a friend (or “cameo” as Openai calls it) permission to use their likeness. However, these restrictions do not apply to the dead. Dead can be generated with almost no obstacles. The still-invited app is available only by invitation, as are 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.

It’s unclear where Openai draws the line on producing videos of the dead. For example, SORA 2 doesn’t produce former president Jimmy Carter, who died in 2024, or Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, but it did create a portrait and video of Robin Williams, who died in 2014, according to TechCrunch’s tests. And while Openai’s Cameo feature allows people to set instructions for how they appear in videos generated by others, a guardrail that came in response to Sora’s early criticism – deceased people don’t have such say. I think Richard Nixon would roll in his grave if he could see the deepfake he made of him defending police abolition.

Openai did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment regarding the acceptability of Deepfaking Dead People. However, it’s possible that a deep dead celebrity like Williams is within the company’s acceptable practices. Legal precedent indicates that a company is unlikely to be liable for defamation of a deceased person.

“To see the legacy of real people, to condense it down to ‘this vague look and sound that’s all you need,’ so you can drive them away from insanity the way others can drive away the horrible TikTok slop,” Williams writes.

Openai’s critics have accused the company of taking a fast and loose approach on such issues, so upon release, Sora was quickly flooded with AI clips of copyrighted characters like Peter Griffin and Pikachu. CEO Sam Altman originally stated that if Hollywood Studios and agencies did not want their IP to be included in SORA-generated videos, they would have to explicitly opt out. The Motion Picture Association has already called on Openai to take action on this issue, declaring in a statement that “established copyright law protects the rights of creators and applies here.” He has since said the company is reversing this position.

Sora is perhaps the most dangerous deepfake-ready AI model that people have access to so far, given how realistic its output is. Other platforms like Xai lag behind, but have even fewer guardrails than Sora, which makes it possible to generate deepfakes of porn of real people. As other companies catch up to Openai, we set a terrible precedent if we treat real people, living or dead, like our own personal play.