Ben Affleck isn’t that worried about artificial intelligence, or AI, taking over his industry.
The “Argo” director recently joined a panel at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit, where moderator David Faber asked how close we really are to a streaming service like Netflix being able to produce entirely new “James Bond” films out of thin air.
“A, that’s not possible now,” replied Affleck. “B, will it be possible in the future? Highly unlikely. C, movies will be one of the last things, if everything gets replaced, to be replaced by AI. AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan — it cannot write you Shakespeare.”
Countless actors have expressed burgeoning concern over the technology, and thousands joined the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 to demand regulations on the use of AI. However, Affleck says the technology won’t be able to match the “taste” of real people hashing out scenes on set “for a meaningful period of time.”
There are a number of garish AI-created examples to bolster Affleck’s point.
“What AI is going to do is disintermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow the costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people [who] want to make ‘Good Will Huntings’ to go out and make it,” he argued.
“AI is a craftsman at best,” he added. “Craftsmen can learn to make Stickley Furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That’s how … large language models basically work … They’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.”
When Faber chimed in with an ominous “not yet,” Affleck briefly paused.
“Craftsman is knowing how to work,” he continued. “Art is knowing when to stop. And I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for AI to learn because it’s [about] taste, lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality.”
Affleck’s answers were clipped on social media to viral results, as some users said they didn’t expect him “to have the most articulate and realistic explanation” of how Hollywood might implement AI — or didn’t have “Affleck’s astute commentary about AI on my bingo card.”
Others noted that people are oddly “surprised whenever Affleck is revealed to be quite intelligent.” Affleck, who formed a production company meant to center creatives in 2022, accurately predicted movie and music streaming services over two decades ago.
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“You have less overhead, shipping, you pay no packaging,” he said in a 2003 interview about the prospect of digital-only sales. “There’s this mammoth amount of executives at music companies that are gloaming off a lot of that money [right now].”
“It’ll be movies on demand, but it’ll be a tiered structure,” he added about the battle against piracy. “It’ll be like if you want to watch it first weekend … if you want to watch it, you’ll pay more and then as it goes to another structure in its release, it’ll become less expensive.”
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