Ben Affleck: AI Is “A Craftsman At Best,” Not An Artist– “Nothing New Is Created, Yet”
Ben Affleck and Gerry Cardinale joined CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 confernece to discuss their partnership, various opportunities in the media industry, and more. Afflecks’ comments on AI have gone viral on social media in 2026.
BEN AFFLECK: A, that’s not possible now. 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 a little… it cannot write you Shakespeare. The function of having two actors, or three or four actors, in a room, and the taste to discern and construct that, is something that currently entirely eludes AI’s capability. And I think it will for a meaningful period of time. What AI is going to do is going to disintermediate the more laborious, less creative, more costly aspects of filmmaking. That will allow 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. Look, AI is a craftsman at best. A craftsman can learn to make Stickley furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That’s how large video models, large language models basically work: a library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret context. But they’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created – or not yet. INTERVIEWER: Not yet. BEN AFFLECK: Not yet. And really, in order to do that – look, craft is knowing how to work. 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 taste. Also, lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality. AI for this world of generative video is going to do key things. I wouldn’t like to be in the visual effects business. They’re in trouble, because what cost a lot of money is now going to cost a lot less, and it’s going to hammer that space. And it already is. BEN AFFLECK: Maybe it shouldn’t take a thousand people to render something. But it’s not going to replace human beings making films. It may make your background more convincing. It can change the color of your shirt. It can fix mistakes that you’ve made. You might be able to get two seasons of House of the Dragon in a year instead of one. And if that happens, according to macroeconomics, in cultures where there are basically oligopolies competing, what should happen is, with the same demand and the same spend, they should just make more shows. You should have the same spend, and now you can just watch more episodes. BEN AFFLECK: Eventually, AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession, where you can say, I’ll pay $ 30. Can you make me a 40-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy? And it’ll do it, and it’ll be a little janky and a little bit weird. But it’ll know their styles. It’ll know those actors, and it will mix, remix it, in effect, and it will do that. That’s the value, in my view, long-term, of AI for consumers. Eventually, my hope for AI is that it’s an additional revenue stream that can replace DVD, which took 15% to 20% out of the economy of filmmaking. And there should be negotiated rights and digital rights. If you want to – because what do people want? To make five-minute, 30-second TikTok videos where they look like the Avengers? Well, great. Just like you used to be able to buy your Iron Man costume at the store, you’re going to buy your Iron Man pack, and you and your buddies are going to look like Iron Man and Hawkeye on Twitch. That’s what’s going to really happen.
