Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon is taking a sunny, Elle Woods-style attitude toward AI, saying the industry shouldn’t “be scared of it” and needs to embrace its possibilities.
The Oscar-wining actress also said, “AI is not going to come to your job — people who know how to use AI are coming for your job. So learn about it.”
Speaking at a panel at PaleyFest L.A. on Friday, Reese Witherspoon held forth on a number of subjects, including the end of “peak TV” and the inevitable coming of artificial intelligence technology to Hollywood.
Her relatively benign take on AI stands in stark contrast to many in the industry who predict AI will eliminate numerous jobs as studios seek to cut costs by replacing humans with algorithms.
Jeffrey Katzenberg recently predicted that AI will slash 90 percent of animation jobs in just three years.
Witherspoon is clearly more optimistic.
“I think AI is not going to come to your job — people who know how to use AI are coming for your job. So learn about it,” she said, according to a report from The Wrap.
“It should be a tool upon which we layer our own creativity, our own humanity and our own ethics … And I would say it’s important for women and people of color and people who are othered sometimes in those developmental spaces, they really need to get in there because we need to have our consciousness represented… Let’s not be scared of it. Let’s dive in. Let’s lean in.”
Witherspoon also took an optimistic view of the end of “peak TV.”
“So we’re going to probably see less stuff — which is probably good, right? It was chaos. It was a flea market,” she reportedly said. “We can slow down a little bit. But there’s going to be a more intention around it, and it’s going to be a little bit harder.”
She noted it’s harder for true movie stars to be born in an industry dominated by streaming.
“I really worry and wonder about what is the world for artists? I mean, are careers like ours possible ever again? Are there opportunities for people to really emerge as a star having no data transparency? How do we even know if something did well or didn’t do well?””
As Breitbart News reported, AI technology is quickly becoming a fact of life in Hollywood.
OpenAI recently made the rounds to studios and talent agencies in a bid to promote Sora, the text-to-video generative AI application that its developers hope will revolutionize the way Hollywood makes movies and TV shows. The application will allow studios to create entire scenes simply by entering a text description of what they want.
Sora has already impressed Tyler Perry, who cancelled plans to construct an $800 million studio expansion in Atlanta, Georgia, after seeing the capabilities of the application.
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