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Actor Ben Affleck pushed back on some of the fears surrounding artificial intelligence‘s impact on the film industry, arguing that the technology will be used as a “tool” to streamline workflows in “all the places that are expensive and burdensome” to produce manually, rather than creating entire movies.
During an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Affleck discussed how he believes AI will change film production, downplaying concerns other Hollywood figures have expressed about the technology.
“I actually don’t think it’s very likely that it can — 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 like Tilly Norwood, like that’s bulls—. I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he asserted.
Ben Affleck is seen at ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ on Jan. 5, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
Tilly Norwood, mentioned by Affleck, is an entirely AI-generated virtual actress created by Eline van der Velden’s company, Particle6, in 2025. The virtual actress went viral after being announced, stirring controversy within the film industry about AI’s role in replacing human roles.
Instead of using AI to replace human roles and creativity, the actor contended that, despite what many believe, the technology isn’t quite at that level just yet.
“I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it,” he said. “And really what it is going to be is a tool just like sort of visual effects and, yeah, it needs to have language around it.”
Affleck added that while “you still need to protect your name and likeness,” there are different methods and laws that already exist to protect actors and actresses from their identity being used without their consent.
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“I can’t sell your f—–g picture for money. I can’t. You can sue me. Period. I might have the ability to draw you to make you in a very realistic way, but that’s already against the law,” he noted, adding that unions and guilds will eventually step in to regulate AI usage.
According to Affleck, another possible use for AI, which would not come at the cost of a human’s job, would be using the technology to simulate hard-to-reach locations which typically drive production costs through the roof.
Various AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are shown on a smartphone screen. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“For example, we don’t have to go to the North Pole, right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas, and you know whatever it is, but then make it appear very realistically as if we’re in the North Pole,” he explained. “It’ll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We’re going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our a– off out there and running back inside.”
The actor said fears surrounding AI are likely rooted in a human sense of “existential dread” tied to the emergence of powerful tools that have the capability of changing the world as we know it.
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“It kind of feels to me like… there’s a lot more fear because we have the sense of this existential dread. ‘It’s going to wipe everything out.’ But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show, which is adoption is slow. It’s incremental,” he argued.
Aside from the human element of fearing the unknown, Affleck also claimed that a lot of the “rhetoric” about AI changing the world comes from the corporations who are building and utilizing the technology in an effort to rationalize the amount of money they’ve invested.
Affleck believes that AI will help filmmakers create projects more efficiently. (Marilla Sicilia)
“I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies where they go, ‘We’re going to change everything in two years. There’s going to be no more work,'” he contended.
“The reason they’re saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the CapEx spend they’re going to make on these data centers with the argument that, ‘Oh you know as soon as we do the next model, it’s going to scale up can be three times as good,’ except that actually, ChatGPT 5 — about 25% better than ChatGPT 4 and costs about four times as much in the way of electricity and data. So they say that’s like plateauing. The early AI the line went up very steeply, and it’s now sort of leveling off.”
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