One of the absolutely lovely, not-at-all exhausting things about living in this exciting modern world of ours is that there are ever more axes on which to track whether any given person is semi-secretly trying to burn down the world. Take, for instance, Reese Witherspoon. America’s sweetheart! A talented performer unafraid to tackle complicated roles! NFT-shilling AI mouthpiece! Truly, her queendom is a land of contradictions.
We’ve reported on Witherspoon’s desire to have herself named Machine Queen Of The Dust-Choked Wastes before, of course; she’s been banging the drum on artificial intelligence for years at this point, generally framing it—just like she did her “World Of Women” NFT scheme from a few years back—as a feminist issue. (We noted her initial advocacy for women learning AI to keep up with their male counterparts back in 2024, while our colleagues over at Jezebel highlighted her doubling down on the topic in a Glamour interview last year.) Now Witherspoon has taken another crack at convincing her legions of social media followers that they have a duty and responsibility to embrace our glorious metal overlords, with a post that’s gone viral (for not entirely positive reasons) on her Instagram this week.
“I think it’s time to learn about AI,” Witherspoon says into the camera, whilst engaging in the business of preparing herself a smoothie. (She skips the part of the process where the machine messily and loudly reduces a bunch of recognizable components down into an easily digestible but totally anonymous slurry, which feels weirdly apt for the hard sell she’s giving here.) Telling a story about how women in her book club are “not keeping up” with technology, the Morning Show star asks her 30.5 million followers “Do you want to learn with me?” (Meanwhile, the fact that we aren’t actually sure whether Witherspoon is proposing something informal, or delivering the first stage of an actual sales pitch for some AI teaching course she’s about to launch, speaks to how aggressively influencer-speak has infiltrated all realms of social media.)
Witherspoon’s comments come as an increasing number of Hollywood types are attempting to play the “Everybody’s doing it!” card for their AI advocacy. We already wrote this week about Doug Liman’s hellish gray movie box and the producers of As Deep As The Grave‘s hideous Val Kilmer puppet; meanwhile, the University Of Southern California just announced an “Institute For Actor-Driven Innovation” that will attempt to indoctrinate/educate acting students on all the ways AI can enhance their careers. (Suggested use cases included being able to run scenes with the digital corpses of beloved actors, getting acting notes from shoddy computer copies of actual celebrities, and having an AI agent feed you potential casting notices. Verily, what a glorious future we’re bringing this generation up within.)
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