Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper (born 1975) has been nominated for twelve Academy Awards across acting, writing and producing — Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper, A Star Is Born, Maestro — without yet winning one, a record that has become its own running joke. As a director he made A Star Is Born (2018), Maestro (2023) and Is This Thing On? (2025). His films have grossed some $13 billion worldwide.

“I stopped fearing AI”

Cooper sat down with Joe Rogan for a three-hour conversation released on January 9, 2026, and the AI section turned into something unusual: a movie star arguing the optimistic side against a podcaster arguing the doom. Rogan raised AI companions, AI music and AI film; Cooper kept declining to be alarmed.

He described reading Benjamín Labatut’s novel The MANIAC, about the mathematician John von Neumann, and said that it was after that book that “I stopped fearing AI” — his reasoning being less techno-optimism than epistemic humility: “there’s so much I don’t know. The older I get, I don’t know anything. I just keep knowing less.” He chats to assistants by voice, as Rogan does, mostly out of curiosity about how they respond: “I do with voice too. I love talking to him.” Looking at generative image work, he told Rogan flatly, “you look at AI art, it’s incredible.”

The most telling exchange came over AI music. Rogan pushed the standard critique — that an AI cover is empty, that “there’s no humanity, there’s no soul.” Cooper, a man who spent years learning to sing and conduct for A Star Is Born and Maestro, refused the premise.

The likeness problem

His one hard edge is the actor’s one: consent and payment for a face. Asked about synthetic performers assembled from every performance ever recorded, Cooper went straight to the 2023 strike, where SAG-AFTRA won digital-replica protections — “protecting our ownership of our likeness so that you can’t use it without a compensation.” He does not think the question is settled.

On generative film he was fatalistic rather than fearful — friends had shown him AI shorts he found “fascinating,” and he shrugged the whole trajectory off with “it’s like, if the ocean’s flowing, what are you gonna do?” The single caveat he does insist on is disclosure: told something is machine-made, he says he switches off. “If you tell me it’s AI, I’m not going to trust anything it’s saying, because it’s not me I’m listening to.” His larger worry, he added, is not art at all but employment: “the thing that maybe will change society more than everything is just the lack of jobs and how we find purpose in life.”