- Ben Affleck said his first close look at AI gave him a "heart attack."
- He then built a company that spent eight months shooting footage to train AI tools for film crews.
- Affleck said he used AI on his upcoming film, "Animals," but won't say exactly how.
Ben Affleck said he wants AI to support filmmakers and artists in the creative process.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles over the weekend, Affleck said his company's AI tools are meant to help creatives work more efficiently, not make them obsolete.
Affleck said his interest in AI grew after he started a visual-effects company, and he was able to use his celebrity status to get a closer look at the early work coming out of Google and OpenAI.
"At first, I kind of had a heart attack. I called Matt Damon, and I was like, dude, we have to do as many movies in the next few years because we're finished," Affleck said.
He said he began wondering how AI could be used "in an ethical way" to help people make movies without shutting others out. His solution, he said, was to create his own dataset so the technology could work "hand in glove" with artists.
So, Affleck said he "raised the money" and spent eight months shooting a large collection of footage, which he used to further train existing AI models for specific filmmaking tasks.
He said AI models first learn basic concepts, such as colors, from huge amounts of footage. But to understand the finer points of filmmaking, the models need more professionally shot material.
"In order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had been trained on my peers' — people I know — work and I was uncomfortable with that," Affleck said. "I thought, that's not really a viable business."
Instead, Affleck said, his company takes open models built on publicly available footage and trains them for cinematic work.
Filmmakers can then further train the tools on their own productions as they work, retaining the proprietary nature of their footage and the learning that comes from it, he said.
Affleck added that the AI is not meant to "replace people" nor "eliminate" them.
"I don't believe that there will ever be 'Just type it in and make a movie that people want to see,'" Affleck said. "But the whole effort behind it was to do something ethical, to do something that did not displace people, but that allowed people in this economy and this world to benefit from this technology."
In July, Netflix paid $587 million for Affleck's company, InterPositive.
Affleck said he also used the AI tool "for lots of things" on his upcoming film, "Animals," mostly during post-production, though he declined to say exactly how. "Animals" is set to be released on Netflix on October 9.
"I'm a little bit hesitant to point out what they are or even talk about it because, like, in my business, we're trying to foster the illusion of reality, right?" Affleck said, comparing it to a magician explaining how a trick works.
AI remains deeply divisive in Hollywood. Some figures, including James Cameron and Martin Scorsese, have supported its use as a creative tool, while others, such as Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan, have questioned its potential impact on jobs and artistic control.
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