Lilly Wachowski

Lilly Wachowski (born 1967 in Chicago) co-wrote and co-directed The Matrix (1999) and its sequels with her sister Lana, along with Bound, Speed Racer, and Cloud Atlas, before co-creating the Showtime series Work in Progress. A quarter century after imagining humanity farmed by its own intelligent machines, she has become one of Hollywood’s most caustic critics of the real thing.

From science fiction to labor fight

During the 2023 strikes she argued on Deadline’s Strike Talk podcast — alongside Craig Mazin — that studios saw AI chiefly as a way to eliminate jobs. In March 2025 she signed the open letter from 400-plus creatives urging the White House not to grant OpenAI and Google a copyright exemption for AI training; Deadline’s headline led with her name. In an interview syndicated by the Tribune papers, she said current AI “is about propaganda. It is about devaluing human beings,” dismissing it as “a money-making tool” whose practical applications are “engineering itself towards commerce.”

Talking to Collider in April 2025, she approvingly read out journalist Moira Donegan’s description of AI as “the ultimate fascist technology” — one that circumvents “variance, originality, imagination, surprise, in favor of mindlessness, repetition, standardization” — adding her own warning that a technology so useful to propagandists demands vigilance. She has also spent recent years publicly objecting to the political right co-opting The Matrix’s “red pill” imagery, part of the same fight, as she sees it, over who controls meaning.