Reese Witherspoon is welcoming the AI revolution in Hollywood and calling on the industry to make sure women are involved in the change. Speaking to Glamour magazine to promote the upcoming fourth season of her Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show,” the Oscar winner said she has made it a priority in her career as a producer to always be “looking forward to how media is evolving and how I can help be part of bringing women along in those emerging industries. And now we’re doing it with AI.”
“It’s so, so important that women are involved in AI because it will be the future of filmmaking,” Witherspoon said. “And you can be sad and lament it all you want, but the change is here. It will never be a lack of creativity and ingenuity and actual physical manual building of things. It might diminish, but it’s always going to be the highest importance in art and in expression of self.”
Witherspoon went on to explain that she uses AI frequently in her everyday life, from search tools like Perplexity to the AI shopping agent Vetted AI.
“Like, if you’re buying a blender, it’ll show you six different blenders and also recommend the best product,” Witherspoon said. “I use AI Assistant. Simple AI is an AI assistant that can be really helpful for anyone out there who doesn’t want to have to make a doctor’s appointment because you don’t want to sit on hold or deal with the problems of navigating hospital systems. It’s an incredible tool to save time.”
The rise of AI in Hollywood has sharply divided the industry. While some welcome the technology (James Cameron, for instance, says he is seeing how AI might be able to cut the cost of blockbusters in half), others refuse to engage with it (Guillermo del Toro was adamant no AI be used in the production of “Frankenstein”). One thing most people agree upon though is that AI can not replace creative jobs. Cameron said in a viral interview with CTV News in 2023 that he doubted AI could ever come up with a “good story” that could replace screenwriters, for instance.
According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”
Read Witherspoon’s full Glamour interview here.