Ben Stiller

Ben Stiller (born 1965 in New York, to comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara) spent the 1990s and 2000s as one of Hollywood’s biggest comedy stars — There’s Something About Mary, Zoolander, Meet the Parents, Tropic Thunder — while directing sharp-edged films like Reality Bites and The Cable Guy. His second act is behind the camera: he directed most of Apple TV+’s Severance, the dystopian workplace drama about surgically divided selves that became a defining series of the decade.

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In March 2025, when OpenAI and Google asked the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan to bless training on copyrighted work without permission, Stiller was among the most prominent names — headlines routinely led with him and Mark Ruffalo — on the responding open letter from more than 400 creatives, an effort spearheaded by his colleague Natasha Lyonne. The letter argued the two companies were “arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries,” urged them to negotiate licenses instead, and noted the arts support over 2.3 million American jobs.

It was a fitting fight for the director of Severance — a show about a corporation that extracts labor from workers who never get to see the fruits of it. Stiller has otherwise engaged the technology with curiosity rather than fury, discussing ChatGPT’s arrival with fellow filmmakers back in 2023 and playing with AI features on social media; his objection, as codified in the letter, is to uncompensated appropriation rather than to the tools themselves.