The last photo Robin Williams uploaded to Instagram was a birthday greeting for his daughter Zelda. After that, silence. He died weeks later, on August 11, 2014, at the age of 63, after a silent battle with Lewy body dementia.
The account remained frozen like a digital tomb for 12 years. No one touched it, until artificial intelligence began resurrecting him without permission. Fake videos using his voice, his face, his laughter, selling things he would never say. Zelda Williams had already said it in 2023 and again in 2025: having that content sent to her was ‘disgusting’ and ‘infuriating’.
This August 17, she and her siblings Zak and Cody reactivated their father’s profile, weeks after what would have been his 75th birthday. They didn’t do it to bring him back to life. They did it so that his real voice, the only one that ever existed, wouldn’t end up buried beneath a digital copy he never authorized.