How These Hollywood Celebrities Feel About AI

AI is one of the most disruptive forces impacting filmmaking today, and it's caused some notable divisions among artists. Some see it as an inevitable tool while others hope it goes the way of monkey NFTs and fades into tech obscurity. So where does your favorite actor or director stand on the issue? Looper compiled some of the most notable reactions in the video above.

It's been disappointing to see some big names concede the fight on AI. Demi Moore, who starred in the beloved 2024 body horror movie "The Substance" as a fading starlet gradually getting replaced, has ironically resigned herself to a similar reality, saying that AI is here whether we like it or not, and that creatives should find ways to work alongside it. Sandra Bullock falls into the same camp. While wary of the potential downsides, she admitted that artists may just need to learn how to work with it.

One of the more disappointing AI backers as of late is "Goodfellas" and "Taxi Driver" director Martin Scorsese. Around the time of his "Mandalorian and Grogu" cameo, Scorsese became an advisor to AI company Black Forest Labs. The organization created Flux, which translates text into images, and Scorsese seems intrigued with using it to storyboard his films. It's a disheartening development, because if Scorsese is okay using AI for storyboards, could we see an AI-generated Scorsese movie in the future? What would that even look like?

Martin Scorsese may be hopping on the AI train, but the next generation of filmmakers seems adamantly against it. Kane Parsons just made his Hollywood debut with "Backrooms," which blew everyone away at the box office. But don't expect him to collaborate with AI companies anytime soon, as he's stated that he'd make generative AI go away entirely if he could.

Even one of Scorsese's contemporaries, Steven Spielberg, is cautious of AI. He's fine with it in certain capacities such as healthcare and education, but doesn't want it making his films. One of the loudest voices against AI is Guillermo del Toro. He didn't mince words at a British Film Institute event (via Variety) about the harm AI can cause: "We are told images can be generated by artificial means. The existence of an image is not just to be there. It is to connect us, to make us feel beauty."

Scarlett Johansson has a personal score to settle with the giant tech behemoths. She got into a legal fight with OpenAI over the alleged unauthorized use of her voice for a ChatGPT vocal model. The voice was taken down, and Johansson, along with hundreds of other creative professionals, launched a campaign to prevent AI companies from illegally using their copyrighted material to train their models. 

Because that's what AI does. It steals and spits out inferior copies. Some may see AI as an inevitable next step, but it doesn't have to be the future. For more celebrity responses, check out Looper's video above.