Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster is not impressed with artificial intelligence. In a new interview with Variety, the veteran star of The Silence of the Lambs said she discovered something strange about AI’s memory, or lack of it. Apparently, even advanced chatbots like ChatGPT seem to have forgotten about her early career.
“You know who forgets that I was the original Annabel in Freaky Friday? AI,” Foster said with a mix of humor and frustration. “If you go on to ChatGPT, or any of those things, and you say, like, ‘Hey, what are the Freaky Friday movies?’ They say there was an original, which is the ‘original’ with Jamie Lee Curtis, and then there’s the second one that just came out. And they don’t mention me! AI has no recollection of the ’70s.”
Is this just a funny oversight? Or a sign of something bigger—technology erasing a part of cultural history it doesn’t bother to understand? Foster’s comments highlight a growing debate about how artificial intelligence handles facts, creativity, and the human record.
The original Freaky Friday was released in 1976, based on Mary Rodgers’ 1972 novel. Foster played Annabel Andrews, a teenager who switches bodies with her mother, Ellen, played by Barbara Harris. The story, simple yet heartfelt, explored empathy across generations through a wild fantasy twist that helped launch Foster to stardom.
Decades later, the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan earned its own place in pop culture. Then, in 2025, audiences saw Curtis and Lohan return again for the sequel Freakier Friday, where new body-swapping chaos hit on the eve of a wedding, and was a box office bomb. Maybe audiences should forget this sequel?
Anyway, if AI “forgets” who first brought the original story to life, what else might is it overlooking? When even a legend like Jodie Foster can vanish from the digital record, it raises a serious question: who’s really in charge of preserving our cultural memory, the humans who made it, or the machines now writing it?
****
English (US) · 