Could a film industry entirely crafted from AI ever exist? Social media is abuzz with movie scenes made with Seedance 2.0, the latest tech in AI video generation, including everything from a fight scene between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise to an alternate ending for The Lord of the Rings.
The tech’s proponents predict AI is the future of movies—but an actual brain behind Hollywood hits, Ben Affleck, is trending for his counterargument: AI may be a powerful tool, but it’s nothing without human creativity.
Affleck recently shared his take on AI-generated writing in an appearance on a podcast. As an Oscar-winning screenwriter himself for Good Will Hunting (not to mention an acclaimed actor, director, and producer), Affleck knows a thing or two about the movie business, and he summed up AI-generated creative writing in one word: “shitty.”
“By its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average,” he said on a January episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “And it’s not reliable. I mean, I can’t even stand to see what it writes.”
“I actually don’t think it’s very likely that it’s going to be able to write anything meaningful or, and in particular, that it’s going to be making movies from whole cloth,” Affleck said. He predicted instead that for filmmaking, AI is “gonna be a tool, just like visual effects.”
But if Affleck is right, then why are artists of all kinds being fed the narrative that AI will be stealing their jobs? Fearmongering from the AI industry is to blame, he claims.
“There’s a lot more fear, because we have this sense, this existential dread: ‘It’s gonna wipe everything out!’ Affleck explained on the podcast. “But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show, which is, A, adoption is slow. It’s incremental.”
“I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies, where they go, ‘We’re gonna change everything! In two years, there’s gonna be no more work!’” he continued. “Well, the reason they’re saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the cap expend they’re gonna make on these data centers.” (Affleck’s comments come as Big Tech spending on AI data centers has swelled in the last year.)
Affleck’s take went viral again this week, thanks to a post on X, from a self-described “guy who works in tech” who is “building with AI and writes a weekly newsletter on the topic”—which joked that Affleck could explain AI’s applications better than industry experts.
Affleck concluded that in filmmaking, LLMs will likely “be good at filling in all the places that are expensive and burdensome,” but that “it’s always gonna rely fundamentally on the human artistic aspects of it.”
Now, some on social media are pointing out that in a sense, Affleck’s point proves itself: The human touch of a creative writer led to clear, digestible communication. Funny how that works.