Ben Affleck says he hopes artificial intelligence will support filmmakers and artists in the creative process.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Screen Time event in Los Angeles over the weekend, Afu said his company’s artificial intelligence tools are designed to help creatives work more efficiently, not make them obsolete.
Affleck said his interest in artificial intelligence grew after he founded a visual effects company and was able to use his celebrity status to get an up-close look at the early work of Google and OpenAI.
“At the beginning, I had a little bit of a heart attack. I called Matt Damon and I said, man, we’ve got to make as many movies as we can in the next few years because we’re done,” Affleck said.
He said he began to wonder how artificial intelligence could be used “ethically” to help people make movies without shutting others out. His solution, he said, was to create his own dataset so that the technology could “work closely” with the artist.
So, Affleck said, he “raised money” and spent eight months shooting a ton of footage, which he used to further train existing artificial intelligence models to perform specific filmmaking tasks.
He said the AI model first learns basic concepts, such as color, from large amounts of footage. But in order to understand the details of film production, models need more professional shooting materials.
“To get that information, I was concerned that most of the models that were being used were trained on the work of my colleagues, people that I knew, and I wasn’t comfortable with that,” Affleck said. “I thought, that’s not really a viable business.”
Instead, Affleck said, his company takes an open model based on publicly available footage and trains them to work on films.
He said filmmakers can further train themselves on the tools they create as they work, retaining the proprietary nature of their material and the knowledge they learn from it.
Afu added that artificial intelligence is not meant to “replace humans” or “eliminate” humans.
“I don’t believe in ‘just enter and make a movie people want to see,'” Affleck said. “But the whole effort behind it is to do something ethical, to do something that doesn’t displace people, but allows people in this economy and this world to benefit from this technology.”
In July, Netflix acquired Affleck’s company InterPositive for $587 million.
Affleck said he’s also using artificial intelligence tools to “do a lot of stuff” on his upcoming film “Animals,” mostly during post-production, but he declined to reveal how. “Animals” will be released on Netflix on October 9.
“I’m a little hesitant to point out what they are or even talk about it because, like in my industry, we try to cultivate the illusion of reality, right?” Affleck said, likening it to a magician explaining how magic works.
Artificial intelligence remains deeply divisive in Hollywood. Some figures, including James Cameron and Martin Scorsese, support its use as a creative tool, while others, such as Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan, question its potential impact on employment and artistic control.