Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore (born 1960) is one of the most decorated actors of her generation, with an Academy Award for Still Alice (2015) and career-defining work in Boogie Nights, Far From Heaven, and May December. Unlike peers who made AI a personal crusade, Moore’s intervention came through collective action — and her name helped make it news.

Lending her name to a one-sentence protest

In October 2024, Moore was among the most prominent signatories of a deliberately terse open statement organized by Ed Newton-Rex, the former Stability AI executive who resigned over the industry’s “fair use” defense of training on copyrighted work. The single sentence — calling unlicensed training “a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works” — launched with more than 11,500 signatures, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Thom Yorke, Kevin Bacon, and Kate McKinnon, and has since grown far larger.

Coverage from NBC News to The Washington Post led with Moore’s name, a measure of how much weight an A-list signature carries in a fight otherwise dominated by working artists. Her signing continued the concerns that fueled the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, in which actors sought guardrails against unconsented digital replicas and AI-generated performances.

Moore has otherwise said little publicly about AI, letting the statement stand as her position: not opposition to the technology as such, but to building it on uncompensated creative labor.