Celebrities are shilling AI companies. Lionel Messi, probably among the top five most famous people on Earth right now, just did a World Cup ad campaign for OpenAI. Some genuinely seem to be hooked on the beguiling guidance of the tech. Others just seem to be chasing another big payday. But why does it keep happening, even in the face of massive public backlash?
There are fewer better places to start than with Charles Porch, a man who was recently profiled in New York Magazine, which christened him “OpenAI’s Hollywood Whisperer.”
Porch worked at Instagram for 15 years, where his job was basically convincing cool famous people to use the platform, turning it into the cultural powerhouse that it is today. In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hired Porch to do the same thing for ChatGPT. Among his list of A-list stars he’s brought into the AI fold is actress Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he arranged a dinner with Altman in September (after a public freakout about rumors of the dinner caused it to be postponed).
A self-styled “tech optimist,” Porch described himself as “not a business-development guy or the brand guy,” but the “relationships person that’s bringing everyone along on new tech” — with that “everyone” all being in a certain tax bracket and with a certain number of Instagram followers.
So one side of the reason why celebrities are falling for AI? Because there’s a very concerted, moneyed, effort to do that by AI companies. Famous people are often targeted this way. It’s why so many of them end up hiring quack doctors, fall into bizarre cultish beliefs if not join actual cults, or throw away their credibility by siding with a person or brand that is decidedly, overwhelmingly, uncool, or goes against everything they appeared to stand for. (A prime example in Hollywood recently: Martin Scorsese’s endorsement of an AI-storyboarding startup.)
But there’s a darker side to this that an anonymously quoted media executive shines a light on. And that’s the fact that celebrities — actors, especially — are more broke and desperate than ever.
“Right now in Hollywood, only the top people are working,” the executive told NYMag. “It’s why Robert Pattinson is in every project or why Nicole Kidman is literally in everything you watch on TV. The next tier down is not getting jobs.”
You can’t overlook the reason why. The tech industry has helped debilitate the movie industry, in a not dissimilar manner to how platforms like Spotify are a parasite sucking money away from artists. Now AI, another tech industry innovation, is coming along and threatening to be the final nail in the coffin by automating tons of creative work. AI can’t replace human creativity, but it can provide a serviceable substitute. Meanwhile, the very uncertainty that AI casts over the industry is enough to spook the bosses running it and cause them to start pinching pennies. Ergo, less work for all.
Then AI, with its immense wealth and unchecked spending, comes marching into the ruins of what it helped destroyed. An obscene amount of capital is being poured into it, and its shining opulence is enough to blind almost anyone.
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