The actress, director, and wild-style futurist Natasha Lyonne is fascinated by technology. She speaks of the beauty and power of interstellar travel and muses about living long enough to walk a Hollywood red carpet as a reanimated cyborg.
But she also has a grave concern, she explained to Fortune’s Brainstorm AI audience on Monday in San Francisco: With all this boundless possibility, why is AI focused on replacing screenwriters instead of, say, figuring out a solution to fixing plastic bottles polluting the oceans? “I don’t think that’s an accident,” said Lyonne, 46. “It’s about cutting costs.”
What the co-founder of the media production company Animal Pictures would like to see is people paid for their expertise, work, and creative ideas, and the democratization of filmmaking so more people can engage in a business that has traditionally had sky-high barriers to entry.
Her rallying cry to C-suites and AI leaders—delivered in her signature wry, New York City accent—is to think really hard about what it means to be human in this age where AI is all the rage, and act accordingly. “We are the ones who are deciding what this use is going to be and how we choose to use it,” Lyonne said. “I really want this to mean a seat at the table for more people to do even more extraordinary things.”
Lyonne, who was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025, joked that she anointed herself CEO of Animal Pictures and updated her LinkedIn with the title because it “seemed like a vibe.” So Lyonne now technically shares the title with others in the C-suite, and she observes a widening divide between senior executives of the world who are deciding how AI will be implemented in companies, and the employees who could see their jobs and opportunities dry up. Even though this moment in AI development includes outside factors like competition with China and meeting Wall Street’s expectations, she argues that the industry must remember that there are serious decisions to be made that history will remember.
Lyonne, who has been in the film business since she was a child actor, pointed out that it takes enormous human legwork—from casts, crews, and everyone from drivers to the creatives who bring ideas onto screens—to keep film and television plodding forward. AI companies that scrape content without permission or payment are neglecting that entire ecosystem, she said. “So I don’t think it’s super-Kosher copacetic to just kind of rob freely under the auspices of acceleration or China, right?”
The Russian Doll and Poker Face star is also a co-founder of Asteria Film Co., a generative AI film and animation studio. Asteria describes itself as being powered by the “first clean AI model”—the “clean” referring to AI that has been trained on models with creative work that is licensed or cleared, rather than content used without payment or permission. She is also directing an upcoming film called Uncanny Valley using an AI video model called Marey that was created based on copy-right cleared, licensed data. The film reportedly doesn’t include AI actors, but it will blend generative AI filmmaking techniques with traditional human-led filmmaking.
As a child, she said, she studied Talmudic texts and interpretations in Aramaic—the ancient language used in Talmudic writings. The complexity in exploring layers of meaning and iterations of theory now informs her approach to AI in filmmaking., she said.
Lyonne said she dropped out of New York University to pursue a self-taught education in film at the indie movie theater The Film Forum. When asked what advice she’d give her younger teenage self, Lyonne suggested mastery of the kind that takes 10,000 hours of work to develop. “Really, really learn these tools,” she said. “It’s really about technique, and that takes a long time… that’s how you learn how to write and all that.”
The beauty of mastering a skill and knowing how to think and create is that then you can break those rules, said Lyonne. “I’m not so much interested in raging against the machine,” she said. “I’m interested in building new houses, new seats at the table.”
Politics8 years ago