Ben Affleck dismisses potential existential threat of AI in Hollywood: “Bullshit”
Ben Affleck has dismissed the rhetoric around the potential existential threat that artificial intelligence poses to Hollywood, calling it “bullshit”.
The actor was speaking during a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, in a clip which has now gone viral, where he played down the threat of AI as he believes it does not have the capability to expand much further beyond its current remit.
“What I see is that if, for example, you try to get Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it’s really shitty,” he said, adding, “And it’s shitty because, by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average, and it’s not reliable.”
To this end, Affleck countered the dialogue about the endless possibilities of AI in the film industry as he continued: “I actually don’t think it’s going to be able to write anything meaningful, and in particular, that it’s going to be making movies from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood – that’s bullshit.”
Norwood is the first ever fully AI-generated actor to be signed to an agency, sparking outrage and condemnation in September last year after Eline Van der Velden, the founder of the AI company Particle 6 Productions, announced the move at the Zurich Film Festival.
Affleck justified his notably different stance from much of the industry as he argued “the technology is not progressing in the way they presented it,” and that in time, AI will simply become a “tool” in filmmaking rather than “decimating” it.
He acknowledged that much of the fear-mongering which exists around AI stems from companies seeking to ascertain new valuations for themselves into the future, which he countered by adding: “Chat GPT 5 is only about 25 per cent better than Chat GPT 4, and costs about four times as much in the way of electricity and data.”
In this sense, he argued that the effect of AI is “levelling off” as limits to the technology are being discovered, and the majority of people are using the software for much more banal activities than high-level filmmaking.
Ultimately, Affleck said that Hollywood “is always going to fundamentally rely on the human, artistic aspects” rather than AI taking over the main working purpose.
His stance comes despite other actors, such as Matthew McConaughey, recently trademarking his catchphrase “Alright, alright, alright” against AI deepfakes, despite being an investor in the company ElevenLabs, which is cloning the voices of dead and alive actors for its ‘Iconic Voice Marketplace’.
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