No, she would not have any success. Take a look at this list and think about the sheer number of companies she would need to sue: https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader.... You'll see Google, one of the richest companies on the planet, and OpenAI, the richest private company on the planet. You'll see plenty of Chinese companies (Bytedance, Alibaba, Tencent, etc.). You'll also see "Open Source" - these models can't be sued, and removing them from the internet is obviously impossible.
The most these lawsuits could hope to do is generate publicity, which would likely just encourage more people to send her videos. This direct plea has that risk too, but I think "please don't do this" will feel a lot less adversarial and more genuine to most people than "it should be illegal for you to do this".
> The most these lawsuits could hope to do is generate publicity, which would likely just encourage more people to send her videos.
It's not fruitless and doesn't only generate publicity. Some states like California and Indiana recognize and protect the commercial value of a person's name, voice, image, and likeness after death for 70 years, which in this case would apply for Robin William's daughter.
Tupac's estate successfully sued Drake to take his AI generated voice of Tupac out of his Kendrick Lamar diss track.
There is going to be a deluge of copyright suits against OpenAI for their videos of branded and animated characters. Disney just sent a cease and desist to Character.ai last week for using copyrighted characters without authorization.
What I'm saying is that successfully suing individual companies or people would have zero impact on her actual problem. If California says it's illegal and OpenAI says they'll ban anyone who tries it, then these people can effortlessly switch to a Grok or Alibaba or open source model, and they'll be extra incentivized to do so because they'll find it fun to "fight back" against California or luddites or whatever. Do you see the difference? Tupac's estate successfully stopped one guy from using Tupac's voice, but they have not and cannot stop the rest of the world from doing so. The same is true for Disney, it is trivial for anyone to generate images and videos using Disney characters today, and it will be forever. Their lawsuit can only hope to prevent a specific very small group of people from making money off of that.
The problem she wants to solve is "people are sending me AI videos of my dad". She will not have any success solving this problem using lawsuits, even if the lawsuits themselves succeed in court.
Is that really the problem she wants to solve? She could just turn off her phone to accomplish that. The problem is multi-layered and complex. Holy shit, It’s her dad. He’s dead. I don’t have her phone number, but let’s pretend I did and we were friends, why would I be texting her videos of her dead father? He’s Robin Williams, sure, but why? why! would I be making AI videos and sending them to her? Forget Sora, if I made a puppet of her father and made a video of him saying things he didn’t say, and then sent it to her, I think I’d still be a psychopath for sending it to her. I think she should sue open AI and California should have it be illegal without a license, and yeah there’s always gonna be a seedy underbelly. I’m sure there’s Mickey Mouse porn out there somewhere. A lawsuit is going to make it official that she is a person and she’s saying hey I don’t like that and that she would like for people to stop it, and that the rest of us agree with that.
The most these lawsuits could hope to do is generate publicity, which would likely just encourage more people to send her videos. This direct plea has that risk too, but I think "please don't do this" will feel a lot less adversarial and more genuine to most people than "it should be illegal for you to do this".