Ben Affleck Doesn’t “Worry About SkyNet” When It Comes To AI; “It’s Another Form Of Computing”

Donald Trump could have done a lot worse than inviting Ben Affleck to his AI lunch with tech CEOs this week at the White House.

Unlike the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and more, the Oscar winner and InterPositive founder isn’t playing defense or doom and gloom when it comes to the quickly evolving technology – at least not in relation to Hollywood. Also, unlike the techlords, Affleck seems to have some perspective.

“When I worry about AI, I worry about like my kids in school,” Affleck told Bloomberg Screentime event this evening on AI and the entertainment business. ” worry about 30% rise in the number of A’s given out at colleges over the last three years. I worry about learned helplessness. I worry about responsible use.”

“I don’t worry about Skynet, and I don’t think that it’s going to take over this business in any meaningful way,” he insisted with a reference to the once again much mentioned humanity killing tech from the Terminator franchise. “I feel this is one of the least likely domains to be disintermediated by AI.”

In a wide ranging conversation Wednesday about his upcoming Netflix flick Animals (“t’s a kidnapping movie”), his years of under the radar serial entrepreneurship, various panicked calls to buddy Matt Damon over the decades, moviemaking, and lessons learned from 1998’s Armageddon, Affleck kept coming back to the fears, future and falsehoods around AI.

In that, the filmmaker got down to the brass binary tacks of the tech.

“What I find is that filmmakers and people, once they sit with it and have a sense of control and a sense of understanding what’s happening, and it moves from this nebulous, abstract, terrifying alien …it’s going to kill us all like we’re paperclips …all this propaganda, they actually see what it is,” he told the industry crowd on the last panel of the day. “It’s another form of computing that does tools, and is a technological advancement that’s really in keeping with the long-standing series of technological improvements we’ve made in the film and television business.”

After over three decades in the business, Affleck made a different sort of news earlier this year when it was revealed in the spring Netflix bought his AI firm for the very non-artificial price of what was later confirmed as $587 million. The joint, which makes AI tools developed by and intended for filmmakers from essentially open source beginnings, saw its staff of less than 20 absorbed into the streamer and Affleck on board as an advisor.

Almost as good an Ambassador for AI as he is for Dunkin Donuts, Affleck added of the tech: “Like a lot of technologies it requires sort of getting comfortable and getting familiar with, and then immediately it’s knowable. You see all the ways in which it doesn’t work, all the failures, the sort of dumb nature of it in a lot of ways, and and it becomes a knowable thing.”

In terms of knowable things, Affleck’s Artist Equity is also taking a swing at realining the economics of the industry to met the realities of changing tech and viewing habits, and keep people employed with reasonable return. Formed in 2022 with BFF Damon and the seemingly everywhere Gerry Cardinale of Redbird Capitol, AE aims to widen the scope of traditional profit participation from a bonus program to a business model.

“What I’m in the process of trying to do, is institute this as on an ongoing basis, so that people are both united,” Affleck said of the company and the notion. “We all give a shit that we do something really good. We’re going to pitch in a little bit together, and we care about this shared vision. And in success, it’s going to rain money on everyone’s head.”

Way better than SkyNet any day.