Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are busy with promoting their new Netflix movie The Rip, and their recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Podcast has everyone talking about AI’s place in film production.
As well as their discussion about the best streaming services allegedly ‘dumbing down’ movies to cater to doomscrollers and background viewers, the long-time collaborators had a few things to say about the direction of AI and whether or not it’s a valuable means of enhancing human creativity for movie making.
But his rant doesn’t end there: “I just can’t stand to see what it even writes” he added, doubling down on his views. This is when Matt Damon stepped in.
Screenwriting aside, generative AI tools are also used for facial modification when creating certain expressions, or even adding actors to a scene without having to have them on set. Much like Affleck’s statements on AI-generated writing, Damon slammed it for similar reasons.
Following an anecdote about a scene from Benny Safdie’s latest movie The Smashing Machine, Damon recalls being moved by Dwayne Johnson’s performance in a particular scene due to his raw display of emotion which he drew from a traumatic experience. “You can have AI understand Dwayne’s face and move it in to different (expressions), no f*****g AI can do that”, says Damon.
From a creative perspective, these views are reasonable – nothing that AI produces can compare to a script that’s rich in depth or an acting performance that comes from the heart – but Affleck doesn’t rule generative AI out altogether.
Though Affleck acknowledged AI’s incapacities, sharing “I think it’s very unlikely that (AI) is going to be able to write anything meaningful, or that it’s going to be making movies from whole cloth”, that’s not to say he doesn’t believe it will be a useful movie making tool.
In a similar light to enhancement technology like CGI and other visual effects tools, Affleck believes AI will play a similar role in future movie production: “The guilds are going to manage this where it’s like ‘if this is a tool that can actually help us'” he starts.
From a union and business point of view, he puts it this way: “For example, we don’t have to go to the North Pole, we can shoot the scene here in our parkas and whatever but make it appear very realistically as if we’re in the North Pole, it’ll save us a lot of money and time”.
It could be that the same applies for the written aspect of movies he says. Not in the sense that AI will be writing full scripts, but it may well become part of generating ideas during the creative process, even if it’s simply asking for help when you’re struggling to build context, which Affleck also highlighted.
As a writer but also a fan of movies, what draws me in the most is the idea that there’s a whole army of creatives behind every aspect of a movie, and one of the most valued parts is knowing that a strong script and compelling acting performances are all coming from talented and intelligent humans. AI in movie production was inevitable, but I fear that Affleck is really downplaying the influence it could have in years to come.
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