Doctor Who: Families Call Out Jon Pertwee-Elisabeth Sladen AI Video
· BCPosted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: ai, doctor who
Doctor Who: Families Call Out Jon Pertwee-Elisabeth Sladen AI Video
Members of the late actors' families are calling out the use of Jon Pertwee's and Elisabeth Sladen's likenesses in a Doctor Who AI video.
Published Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:37:08 -0600
by Ray Flook
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Article Summary
- Doctor Who families condemn an AI video using Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen likenesses without consent.
- Jon Pertwee’s children say the late Third Doctor would be “furious,” calling the AI recreation invasive and creepy.
- Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter Sadie Miller blasts the Doctor Who AI video as abhorrent, disrespectful, and non-consensual.
- After Miller objected, producers removed the original video and replaced Sladen’s AI image with a real actress.
Family members of beloved Doctor Who icons Jon Pertwee (Third Doctor) and Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith) are making it clear that the late actors' likenesses should not be used for AI-generated content and that they would be "furious" (as Pertwee's daughter, Dariel, shared with The Times) if they were alive to see it. In the latest reporting, Dariel shared that she and her brother Sean found the recent AI video was not a "creation that my father would have approved of" and that they were "naturally upset" by it. Going on to call it "invasive" and "creepy and disrespectful," Dariel noted that her father "struggled with tech in 1996 and would have had a terrible time [with AI] now."
In a social media post first reported by The Telegraph, Sladen's daughter Sadie Miller also spoke out on the use of her mother's likeness and image after she had passed. "I don't want to give this person traction or publicity, but let's normalise calling people who make AI videos of people's dead relatives what they are — a bit of a pervy weirdo. This video uses AI images of my mother, making her say and do things she has not agreed to do because she is dead. Anyone watching, promoting and especially making this type of content is abhorrent. My mum would HATE this, as would Jon. Stop feeding strangers into a computer because you're a pervert."
Miller also drew a clear distinction between an actor taking over a character (Miller voices Sarah Jane Smith for audio drama adventures) and AI actually imitating a real person. "An actor reading a script is very clearly not the same thing as an actor being made to do something in an artificially generated way with no option to consent. I do not play my mum, I play Sarah, a fictional character … It is shocking having someone decide her face, body, voice is their property and puppet. If you don't understand basic concepts like consent, I really wouldn't put this on the internet. If this was done with good intentions, then why were we, as a family, never told? Incredibly creepy. Just because you want to watch it doesn't mean someone should make it."
For their part, the producers of the video issued a statement saying they reached out to Miller after hearing of her concerns, and that they "offered to remove the content if she wished. She said yes, so the original video was removed on Oct 12." The statement would go on to note that a real actress had been hired to replace the AI-generated images of Sladen (Bleeding Cool is making the editorial decision not to name the producers or promote the video).
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