Hollywood actors might be far removed from the field of AI, but they can often have surprisingly nuanced takes on how it’ll impact their field.
Ben Affleck recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, where he offered a technical critique of generative AI and its limitations. The actor, who has experience both in front of and behind the camera as a director and producer, didn’t hold back in his assessment of AI-generated content. His comments touched on everything from the fundamental limitations of large language models to the economic pressures driving AI hype, offering a perspective that aligns more closely with AI researchers than typical Hollywood commentary.
The Core Problem: AI Averages Everything Out
“What I see is, for example, if you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it’s really shitty,” Affleck said. “And it’s shitty because by its nature it goes to the mean, to the average, and it’s not reliable. I just can’t stand to see what it writes now.”
He acknowledged AI’s utility as a limited tool: “It’s a useful tool if you’re a writer and you’re going, ‘What’s the thing? I’m trying to set something up where somebody sends someone a letter but it’s delayed two days,’ and they can give you some examples of that.”
However, Affleck was skeptical about grander claims for AI in creative industries: “I actually don’t think it’s very likely that it’s gonna be able to write anything meaningful, and in particular that it’s gonna be making movies from cloth, totally. That’s bullshit. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
The Economics Behind AI Hype
Affleck’s analysis became particularly pointed when discussing the economics driving AI development. “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.’ The reason they’re saying that is because they need to ascribe evaluation for investment that can warrant the CapEx spend they’re gonna make on these data centers with the argument that, ‘As soon as we do the next model, it’s gonna scale up. It can be three times as good.'”
He noted the diminishing returns in recent AI development: “Except that actually ChatGPT-5 is about 25% better than ChatGPT-4 and costs about four times as much in the way of electricity and data. So that says that’s plateauing. The early AI, the line went up very steeply, and it’s now sort of leveling off. It’s gonna get better, but it’s gonna be really expensive to get better.”
The actor also pointed to an unexpected reality about AI usage: “A lot of people were like, ‘F*ck this, we want GPT-4,’ because it turned out the vast majority of people who use AI are using it as companion bots to chat with at night. And so there’s no work, there’s no productivity, there’s no value to it. I would argue there’s also not a lot of social value to getting people to focus on an AI friend who’s telling you that you’re great and listening to everything you say and being sycophantic.”
AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement
Ultimately, Affleck sees AI filling a specific niche in creative work: “The way I see the technology and what it’s good at and what it’s not, it’s gonna be good at filling in all the places that are expensive and burdensome and that make it harder to do it, and it’s always gonna rely fundamentally on the human artistic aspects of it.”
He compared it to existing filmmaking tools: “Technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. Really what it is is gonna be a tool just like visual effects.”
The Broader Industry Context
Affleck’s concerns echo those of other major filmmakers. Director James Cameron has been particularly vocal about AI’s potential dangers. “I believe that generative AI is very dangerous if it eliminates that sacred process of working with and through the actors to tell stories,” he’d said earlier this month.
Yet AI is no longer a theoretical phenomenon in filmmaking—it’s already being deployed in significant production efforts. Last year, the Tamil version of the 2013 movie Raanjhanaa was re-released with a new ending created by AI. Amazon Prime Video’s series House of David extensively used AI for its scenes, and Netflix said it had used AI for the first time in one of its shows when an Argentinian sci-fi series needed to show a collapsing building. Earlier this year, the Tamil movie Jana Nayagan appears to have used Google’s AI to create some shots of its trailer—a trailer that was viewed by over 30 million people in 24 hours.
Affleck’s measured take—acknowledging AI as a useful but limited tool while rejecting maximalist claims about its transformative potential—may prove prescient. As the technology matures and the hype cycle inevitably corrects, his prediction that “adoption is slow, it’s incremental” and that AI will augment rather than replace human creativity could well define how the entertainment industry ultimately integrates these tools. The key question isn’t whether AI will change filmmaking, but whether it will do so while preserving what Cameron calls “that sacred process” of human storytelling.