Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 17, 2026
Would it surprise you to learn that Reese Witherspoon is now super into AI? Probably not, right? While many major stars in the entertainment industry have been candid in their disdain for the water-gobbling plagiarism machine that executives are eager to implement at the cost of thousands of jobs, there are a few business-minded figures who know a good grift when they see one. Witherspoon has been talking up the magic of AI for a while now, and a recent Instagram post saw her double down in spectacular fashion. "the jobs women hold are 3x more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25% lower than men on average. We don't want to be left behind," she wrote. While her friends like Kerry Washington commented in support, many were sceptical and outright annoyed.
The whole thing felt like a mealy-mouthed sales pitch for an impending product launch. We wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to hear that Witherspoon had become a board member of some AI brand or was launching her own, in the vein of Natasha Lyonne's "ethical AI" production company. Whatever the case, it feels off, another sign of rich person blindness that is bad news for the rest of us. Why is Witherspoon, an extremely wealthy and multi-award-winning actor-producer, so eager to get her fans to care about AI, and by extension, her involvement in it?
For those of you with good memories, you'll know that we've been here before. Only a few years prior, Witherspoon hopped onto the NFT bandwagon with eagerness. In hindsight, the crash and burn flopping of non-fungible tokens seems obvious, and at the time... actually, it was also kind of obvious. The warning signs of a bubble about to pop were all there. But so many celebrities jumped onto the bandwagon, either encouraged by management and investors or truly committed to the cause, and suddenly we were besieged by ugly apes. In 2021, Witherspoon threw her weight behind World of Women, in NFT collective that sold itself as an "empowering" celebration of inclusivity in the male-dominated world of cryptocurrency. Her company, Hello Sunshine, had optioned these NFTs and made big plans to adapt them into film and TV projects. Just to be clear: these were bad artworks of ill-defined women with no real characteristics. Shockingly, none of these movies came to be.
Witherspoon talked up NFTs in much the same way every other businessperson in the space did, but she also positioned herself as your BFF guide with whom we could "learn together." She wanted to "educate" women on the space and help equip them with the tools for navigating the future, and that just so happened to involve telling them to buy a link to a cartoon for a few thousand dollars. These NFTs didn't do anything, let alone improve women's lives. All it offered was the chance to hand your money over to a peppy blonde wallet inspector who got rich off your savings. Those World of Women NFTs, by the way, now sell for about $350.
As with the snake oil of NFTs, Witherspoon's AI pitch is vague and without tangible promises beyond making sure you don't fall behind (although AI stuff isn't quite as mired in the endless hustle culture "number go up" nightmare that NFTs and crypto were.) How, exactly, will women embracing AI help them in the future if, by your own admission, their jobs are most likely to be automated by this technology? It sounds like you want an eager workforce to make their livings obsolete in the name of feminism. And what are the benefits beyond unemployability and a poisoned water supply? Tech bros have long loved to frame their cruelty as a form of social justice, and Witherspoon is no different here. Just shouting "Women", like a gif, isn't a real foundation to stack a crumbling empire upon.
Witherspoon reinvented her career as a mega-producer and dealmaker after a few post-Oscar years in the rom-com wilderness. She's one of the era's best examples of launching an uber-successful second act, branching out into behind-the-scenes power playing that helped to build an empire. A lot of her fellow actresses have followed in her footsteps, whether it's through optioning books for adaptation, "writing" their own novels (Witherspoon did one with Harlan Coben), or launching products and other side hustles. As a celebrity, she's an excellent role model for other celebrities. But that doesn't work for one single moment when she tries to be a guide for average women.
None of her arguments have ever made sense. They're just the same tech bro lines with a sheen of pink over the top. We're constantly being told that these advancements and gimmicks are "inevitable" and that we have to invest in them immediately lest we be left behind. Witherspoon spins this as a feminist topic: women need to break the glass ceiling by buying ugly drawings of cartoon women and sticking all their data into ChatGPT. How any of this is meant to take shape or mould our futures is seldom explained. They're just weak lines of empowerment cloaked in vague notions of the sisterhood. It's here to stay. We have to be part of the conversation. We can't let the men do all the scamming.
The pinkwashing of AI and cryptocurrency has always been a parodic endeavour, one that falls apart the moment you apply onto it the lightest touch of scrutiny. Tying a marginalized group's socio-economic future to their investment in an environmentally disastrous cycle of hustle culture, "innovation", and Silicon Valley smoke and mirrors is sleazy, even if you only do it once. Committing to it twice, like Witherspoon, just leads us to wonder why she has such contempt for her own fans. We'll wait to see where her "AI for women" hoopla goes. We expect her to move onto something even dodgier in two to three years.
"Women need to be part of these conversations," Witherspoon wrote in her Instagram comments, clearly surprised by the largely negative responses to her video. As her recent business endeavours show, only certain women get to sit at her table. Everyone else has to pay.
