Issa Rae

Issa Rae (born 1985) parlayed her web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl into Insecure, the Peabody-winning HBO comedy she created, wrote, and starred in for five seasons. Through her company Hoorae Media she has become one of Hollywood’s most influential producer-stars — and a pointed critic of where AI could take the industry.

Living the worst-case scenario

In Black Mirror’s 2025 episode “Hotel Reverie,” Rae plays a modern movie star who licenses her likeness into an AI-driven remake of a classic film — and gets trapped inside it. Discussing the role with TV Insider, she said the script, arriving right after the 2023 strikes in which SAG-AFTRA and the writers fought over AI, “felt like, ‘Oh, this is what we’re fighting against, and this is the worst-case scenario of what we anticipate.’”

Rae went further than dramatizing the fear: asked about studios using AI to recreate performances or insert contemporary actors into classic films, she said “I’m completely against it,” calling the practice a violation of the original work — and warning that the technology “would eliminate so many jobs.” On Marie Claire’s Nice Talk podcast in 2025 she widened the lens, voicing unease that a handful of tech billionaires steering AI are “dictating so much of our lives” and predicting that some form of rebellion against that concentration of power is coming.