MOVIE NEWS – Ben Affleck is outspoken in his support for the positive use of AI in Hollywood and doesn’t see it as a threat to creativity…

Ben Affleck is the latest star to share his thoughts on the use of artificial intelligence in the film industry. The actor-director has been candid about how he believes it will be a long time before a machine can replicate human storytelling. Speaking with David Faber at the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha Investor Summit (via Variety), Affleck reflected on the topic at length, sharing his bold view that movies rely too much on human emotion and creativity for AI to replace them.

The use of AI in movies, TV shows, and the world in general is a daily debate that continues to generate a wide range of opinions. Affleck says many aspects of AI “lower the barrier to entry” for people without millions in studios, but he ultimately sees it as imitative, not creative. He said:

“AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare. The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct… that is something that currently entirely alludes to AI’s capability and I think will for a meaningful period of time.

What AI is going to do is dis-intermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow 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.”

Ben Affleck says artificial intelligence can’t learn when to stop

While the rise of artificial intelligence technology has raised concerns about job losses, Affleck doesn’t believe it will soon replace real filmmaking. He continued his assessment by adding:

“AI is a craftsman at best. 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 video models, large language models, basically work. They’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.

Craftsman is knowing how to work. 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 taste, and also lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality.”

Affleck then used HBO’s series Succession to highlight the limits of AI’s ability to go beyond what a person has already created. He pointed out that the most AI can do is rearrange the content that is displayed. He concluded:

“AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of ‘Succession’ where you could say, ‘I’ll pay you $30 and can you make me a 45-minute episode where like Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy?’ and it’ll do it. And it will be a little janky and a little weird but it will know the sass and those actors and it will remix it in effect. That’s the value long-term.”

As Hollywood continues to grapple with how to integrate AI capabilities into the industry’s day-to-day operations without jeopardizing the jobs of technicians, designers and writers in the long term, it seems Affleck believes there will always be a place for humans in the film industry, at least for the foreseeable future…

Source: Variety