Sunny Hostin Defends AI as 'New Art Form' on The View — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Sunny Hostin defended generative AI as a "new art form" on The View, disclosing she recently licensed her name and likeness to AI company Fountain 0.
- Hostin said she partnered with Fountain 0 after spending six years trying to get her New York Times best-selling trilogy adapted into film or TV series.
- Joy Behar countered that AI means "real people are not working," while Alyssa Farah Griffin warned the technology risks replacing Black and Brown actors and training on existing actors' intellectual property without residuals.
- Hostin acknowledged she "thought about it a lot" before licensing her likeness, framing AI as a way to bypass studios that won't greenlight diverse projects.
- Ana Navarro pressed Hostin on ethical concerns about working with an AI company, and Behar told her to "force them to do it rather than have a robot replace Black people in movies."
- Hostin conceded that the AI "train has left the station" and said she believes there will be "enormous benefits," while insisting studios — not her — are the ones displacing Black and Brown talent.
Why it matters: The exchange highlights a central tension in Hollywood's AI debate: tools pitched as a way to democratize access for underrepresented creators could also displace the very Black and Brown performers whose stories need telling. Hostin's pitch — that gatekeeping is the bigger evil — has not persuaded her co-hosts that licensing likenesses to AI firms is the answer, and her own six-year struggle to get a bestselling trilogy produced underscores just how high the barriers she says AI can bypass really are.
Ask SkimNews
