Ben Affleck isn’t that anxious about synthetic intelligence, or AI, taking on his business.
The “Argo” director not too long ago joined a panel at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit, the place moderator David Faber requested how shut we actually are to a streaming service like Netflix having the ability to produce fully new “James Bond” movies out of skinny 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.”
Numerous actors have expressed burgeoning concern over the expertise, and hundreds joined the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 to demand rules on using AI. Nevertheless, Affleck says the expertise gained’t be capable of match the “taste” of actual individuals hashing out scenes on set “for a meaningful period of time.”
There are a quantity of garish AI-created examples to bolster Affleck’s level.
“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.”
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Affleck’s solutions have been clipped on social media to viral outcomes, as some customers mentioned they didn’t anticipate him “to have the most articulate and realistic explanation” of how Hollywood may implement AI — or didn’t have “Affleck’s astute commentary about AI on my bingo card.”
Others famous that persons are oddly “surprised whenever Affleck is revealed to be quite intelligent.” Affleck, who shaped a manufacturing firm meant to middle creatives in 2022, precisely predicted film and music streaming providers over twenty years in the past.
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“You have less overhead, shipping, you pay no packaging,” he mentioned in a 2003 interview concerning the prospect of digital-only gross 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 concerning the battle towards 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.”
