Jared Leto is the latest celebrity to get in on the artificial intelligence investment game.
The Oscar winner and Thirty Seconds to Mars singer is one of the investors in a generative AI startup called Captions.
Leto has invested alongside venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Index Ventures and Adobe, in the company.
According to Bloomberg, the company raised $60 million in new investments, putting its valuation at $500 million.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Leto’s representatives for comment.
Captions has several tools, including AI video editing, eye contact correction (for a person looking directly into the camera while speaking), translation and editing.
This is the second AI startup Leto has invested in this year.
Last month, the “House of Gucci” star put up some cash, along with other investors, in Pika.
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Pika, according to Bloomberg, has a program that lets people generate short videos from written prompts, images or videos.
Generative AI has been a hot-button topic in Hollywood over the past year, ever since it became a main sticking point in negotiations during the writers and actors’ strikes last summer.
Many celebrities denounced the technology, but Leto and others have thrown support, and money, behind it.
Leonardo DiCaprio serves as the strategic adviser for Regeneration VC, a fund that recently invested $1.6 million in an AI recycling company called Greyparrot in February after an investor fell through.
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According to its website, Greyparrot uses “cutting-edge AI computer vision systems deployed globally in sorting facilities” to “monitor and sort through large waste flows at scale.”
Robert Downey Jr. has a venture fund as well, the Footprint Coalition, which he launched at an AI conference hosted by Amazon in 2019. It also has an environmental focus.
The fund invested in ClimateAI in 2021 with several other groups. According to its website, ClimateAI “has built the first climate resilience platform, pioneering the application of artificial intelligence to mitigate the impact of climate change and uncover new opportunities that may arise as a result.”
Ashton Kutcher and music manager Guy Oseary co-founded investing firm Sound Venture, which last year included companies OpenAI, Anthropic and Stability AI in its portfolio.
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However, the “That ’70s Show” star faced backlash last month after he made comments praising OpenAI’s generative video tool, Sora.
Impressed by its abilities, Kutcher noted it would cut down on production costs and possibly lead to a future where anyone could generate a movie based on their own ideas.
“You’ll be able to render a whole movie. You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script. Then you’ll input the script into the video generator, and it will generate the movie,” he said, Variety reported. “Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”
Kutcher was criticized on social media for appearing to advocate replacing crew members and actors’ jobs.
Following the backlash, Kutcher took to X to address his comments.
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“I don’t think AI will replace the film industry or creative arts. It’s an amazing tool that we should learn to work with to become more prolific and efficient as artist. In the same way we use Avid, final draft, greenscreen, Led bg and other technical tools. Acting like it doesn’t exist will be catastrophic,” he wrote.
“Jobs will change, denying that is turning a blind eye to facts. There use to be someone that taped the film together. There use to be someone that checked the gate,” he continued. “We need to be prepared and understand what’s coming.”
Other celebrities in the movie and music worlds are seeking regulation for the technology.
In April, over 200 musicians signed a letter speaking out about their rights when it comes to AI, including Katy Perry and Miranda Lambert.
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“We, the undersigned members of the artist and songwriting communities, call on AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists,” the letter began.
The open letter was submitted by the Artist Rights Alliance, a non-profit made up of “working musicians, performers and songwriters fighting for a healthy creative economy and fair treatment for all creators in the digital world,” according to its official website.
The letter notes that “AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity” when used “responsibly.”
“This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem,” the letter continues.
Last year, “Family Ties” star Justine Bateman made it clear AI had no place in Hollywood for her.
“I think AI has no place in Hollywood at all. To me, tech should solve problems that humans have,” Batemen told Fox News Digital. “Using ChatGPT or any … software that’s using AI to write screenplays, using that in place of a writer is not solving a problem. We don’t have a lack of writers. We don’t have a lack of actors. We don’t have a lack of directors. We don’t have a lack of talented people.”
Fox News Digital’s Caroline Thayer and Larry Fink contributed to this report.
