Gal Gadot is defending her part in Bitcoin, the Doug Liman biographical thriller that plans to use AI to "adjust" some of its actors' performances. On the podcast Happy Sad Confused she said she is afraid of the technology but will not turn away from it, that she is studying it and trying to understand it, and that an actor who refuses to work with AI risks falling out of the industry altogether. She also said she and her lawyers spent six months going through every possible scenario for how AI could be used on the production, so that it would not affect her performance in any way. Variety reported that she had to mount the defense after her involvement became known.
The film, which also stars Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson, was already contentious before Gadot spoke. At a UK audition earlier this year, the production told performers that AI might be used to correct some of their work, and that actors would perform on a markerless performance capture stage rather than traveling to real locations, using new AI tools to do it.
Those two facts belong in the same sentence, and almost no one has put them there. The production is telling actors their performances may be adjusted by software. Gadot, individually, secured six months of legal work establishing that hers will not be. That is not a contradiction in her position so much as a description of what her position is worth: she has bought an exemption from the thing she is publicly advising everyone else to accept. A lead with her leverage can negotiate an AI carve-out. A day player at a UK audition cannot, and the reason the audition made news is that they were told so in the room.
The reception was not kind. One Reddit commenter wrote that she was defending AI in film again, displaying a talent for never landing on the right side of an argument. Another suggested that if her films were going to use AI anywhere, the acting would be the logical place to start. A third accused her of protecting her own job while other creative workers lose theirs.
That last one is the only response that engages with what she actually said, and it is not wrong. But the mockery arrives pre-loaded for reasons that have little to do with AI. Gadot has not been read as an actress in tune with the moment for years. Outside two prominent turns as Wonder Woman, her recent screen appearances have mostly generated jokes, and the viral March 2020 video of her singing John Lennon's "Imagine" is still the reference point. Her line readings have spawned enough parodies online that any statement she makes now enters a hostile room. The AI comments are being punished partly as the latest entry in a longer file.
Strip the celebrity away and the argument itself is ordinary. Professionals across creative industries keep saying that refusing AI means falling behind, and the claim gets louder as technology companies push their products into those industries. What has changed is the audience. Criticism of AI use is intensifying, and some companies have started advertising the fact that they do not use it — a marketing move that only makes sense once the technology has become a liability rather than a credential.
That inversion is the thing to watch, because it reprices the sentence Gadot used to defend herself. Work with AI or leave the industry is a statement about where the industry is going, and it only holds while audiences are indifferent to how a performance was made. If the irritation keeps building, the line stops reading as foresight and starts reading as something an actor said once, in a podcast, about a movie about bitcoin.