Unions representing Hollywood actors and writers went on strike last year to secure protections against AI systems taking their jobs. But Ben Affleck says that actors and screenwriters shouldn’t worry about AI because it’s not capable of doing either job today, and likely won’t for a long time.
“Movies will be one of the last things — if everything gets replaced — to be replaced by AI,” said Affleck during an onstage interview with CNBC last week. “AI can write you an excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan; it cannot write you Shakespeare.”
Affleck, who runs a movie studio with Matt Damon now, seems to have a decent grasp on how AI works, offering a barebones definition of transformer architectures at one point in the interview. He’s surprisingly optimistic regarding AI’s impact on the film industry, saying it may actually create more work for actors and screenwriters. That said, Affleck notes that the visual effects business could be in trouble.