Hollywood has become a major battleground in the age of AI.
Some of the greatest storytellers in the business, like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg, have criticized the use of artificial intelligence, while legendary stars like Taylor Swift and Matthew McConaughey have decided the best way to protect themselves from AI slop is to file trademark applications to protect their voices and likenesses.
Other celebrities have decided the best way to understand AI is to experiment with it.
Whether it’s as founders, investors, advisors, or creators, a growing number of well-known celebrities are positioning themselves at the forefront of the AI boom.
Here are 12 celebrities who support AI.
Ben Affleck
The Oscar winner has made some major bank thanks to AI.
In July, federal filings revealed that Netflix paid $587 million for Affleck’s upstart InterPositive, which he founded in 2022.
The company develops tools that allow filmmakers to use an AI model that helps enhance post-production work like sound mixing, re-lighting shots, and adding visual effects.
“What AI is going to do is disintermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard,” Affleck said at the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit.
Darren Aronofsky
The director behind “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan” has taken major strides in experimenting creatively with AI.
Aronofsky’s company Primordial Soup, which he launched in 2025, teamed with Google’s DeepMind to produce short films. The company is also behind the animated series “On This Day… 1776,” which uses AI tools to recreate moments from the year the country was founded.
“After the Lumiere brothers and Edison’s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras,” Aronofsky said in a statement about Primordial Soup. “Later technological breakthroughs — sound, color, VFX — allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.”
James Cameron
James Cameron continues to bring innovation to moviemaking.
The Oscar-winning director behind some of the highest-grossing movies of all time, like “Titanic” and “Avatar,” announced in 2024 that he joined the board of directors of Stability AI.
The company, which was founded in 2019, is best known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. It is also behind Stable Audio, which does music and sound generation.
“I’ve spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the very boundaries of what’s possible, all in the service of telling incredible stories,” Cameron said in a statement about joining the board.
“I was at the forefront of CGI over three decades ago, and I’ve stayed on the cutting edge since. Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave. The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined.”
Robert Downey Jr.
Downey Jr. has gone from saving the planet in Marvel movies to trying to save the Earth in the real world with the help of AI.
In 2019, he launched The Footprint Coalition, an organization that is dedicated to using advanced technologies for the good of the environment.
“Between robotics and nanotechnology, we could clean up the planet significantly, if not totally, in 10 years,” Downey Jr. said in an opening keynote for Amazon’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas in 2019.
Since its start, the organization has made investments in carbon removal and climate change, and a science engine that supports researchers and scientists, according to a 2023 impact report it posted on its website.
Ashton Kutcher
The actor and investor co-founded Sound Ventures, which was an early investor in AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
In July, Kutcher left Sound Ventures after 11 years to start a new VC firm. The yet-to-be-named company will focus on investing in startups in the AI space.
At the Berggruen Salon in Los Angeles in 2024, the “That ’70s Show” star predicted how AI will change storytelling in Hollywood.
“What’s going to happen is there is going to be more content than there are eyeballs on the planet to consume it,” he said. “So any one piece of content is only going to be as valuable as you can get people to consume it. And so, thus the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something being good, the bar is going to have to go way up, because why are you going to watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
Natasha Lyonne
Lyonne cofounded the AI production studio Asteria with filmmaker Bryn Mooser in 2022 and plans to direct a movie using its tech.
Lyonne’s directorial debut, “Uncanny Valley,” will use Asteria’s tools to tell a story that follows “a teenage girl who begins to lose her grip on reality as a globally popular augmented reality video game starts glitching feverishly with increasingly dangerous real-world consequences,” according to Variety.
“I’m not trying to run a tech company. It’s more that I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t want the tech people deciding the future of the medium,” Lyonne told Vulture in 2025 of her motivations for founding Asteria.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Paltrow recently made headlines for reportedly planning an off-the-record dinner at her home honoring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. But her interest in AI goes back to at least 2021.
The Goop founder has invested in several AI companies, including the customer service automation startup Forethought AI, the beauty-tech startup Potion AI, the AI-powered meditation app Moments of Space, and the text-to-speech platform Speechify, which also has used her voice.
Paltrow also launched the VC fund Kinship Ventures with entrepreneur Moj Mahdara; its website lists “AI-enabled tools & consumer tech” as one of its current investment areas.
Martin Scorsese
Throughout his career, Scorsese has challenged himself to break the boundaries of storytelling on the big screen, and he isn’t afraid to explore how AI can push those boundaries even further.
In June, the Oscar winner announced he’d become an advisor at the AI firm Black Forest Labs. The “Goodfellas” director also revealed that he used Black Forest’s AI tools to craft a storyboard for an upcoming film.
“Now, with this tool, I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team — the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer,” Scorsese says in a quote featured on the company’s website.
Tye Sheridan
The “Ready Player One” and “X-Men” star has been in the AI game for a decade.
Sheridan founded the AI-based 3D animation and VFX tools company Wonder Dynamics in 2016 with VFX artist and filmmaker Nikola Todorovic. In 2024, the company was acquired by Autodesk.
“Well, I won’t say that AI is something that shouldn’t scare people, in general,” Sheridan told Indiewire in 2024. “I think that to say that AI is anything in general is too broad, it’s too complex. I think you have to consider exactly how it’s being used in each instance to then make an assessment of whether it’s an ethical use of AI or not.”
Matt Stone and Trey Parker
“South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s company Deep Voodoo has become Hollywood’s go-to for deepfake technology.
Stone and Parker created the company during Trump’s first administration, when they were developing a deepfake movie on the president. After the project was scrapped during the pandemic, Deep Voodoo lived on as a way for creatives to use deepfake tech.
The company is behind some memorable works: Kendrick Lamar’s music video for “The Heart Part 5,” in which the artist’s face morphs seamlessly into that of O.J. Simpson, Kanye West, and Will Smith. It also is responsible for Bill Clinton’s tirade at a Dunkin’ Donuts in an episode of “Ted.”
“I find that a lot of discussions about AI become tiresome. You know, ‘Put your taxes in and it can do them.’ And it’s like, ‘Cool, but a human can do your taxes.’ What we’re trying to do is something no amount of humans can do,” Stone told The Hollywood Reporter in March.
will.i.am
The Black Eyed Peas member is fully engrossed in AI.
With his company FYI.AI, a messaging platform designed for the creative community to manage their digital assets, will.i.am is focused on everything from the audio world to the classroom.
The offshoot RAiDiO.FYI is made up of a series of interactive radio stations with an AI host who can help craft your perfect playlist.
The Grammy winner is also teaching a course on AI. With FYI EDU, a partnership he’s doing with Arizona State University, he works with students on how to build their own AI agents.
“It’s the greatest time to dream and materialize concepts that haven’t been materialized,” will.i.am told NPR in April.
Serena Williams
The tennis great is now becoming a major player in the VC world.
Williams has spent the last decade building her portfolio, making angel investments in over 60 companies, including ed tech unicorns like MasterClass and consumer-product startups like Billie and Daily Harvest.
This year, she launched the Starfire Fund. Its goal is to make initial investments in the range of $5 million to $10 million into tech and AI-enabled companies focused on empowering individuals and the experience economy.
“Everything that we invest in, if they don’t have a future in AI, if they’re not thinking about AI, we’re second-guessing our investment in them,” Williams said at the American Business Forum in 2025.
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