After Ben Affleck made news this week talking about the use of AI in his new film Animalsand now it’s deepening its approach to using technology responsibly.
Affleck spoke for the first time about The animals use of AI to BloombergAt Wednesday’s Screentime event, he said, “I used (AI) for a lot of things in this movie. I’m a little hesitant to point out what it is – or even talk about it – because in my business we try to foster the illusion of reality, right?” He added: “But yes, we used it, and actually I thought it was a good example (of how to use AI ethically) because it’s a very human film.”
At the Netflix film’s premiere on Thursday, Affleck said The Hollywood Reporter that his approach to AI is “very simple, I wouldn’t use something that trained or learned from a written work, or that was an intelligence created by a peer of mine or someone I admired. That’s why we created a dataset that was proprietary, so it didn’t need to be extractive.”
He added that he was not at all interested in making films “where you just type things in and things come out” because “I don’t think it will ever happen in a way where anyone will care enough to want to see it. I wouldn’t want to be a part of it if that were the case. What I’m trying to do is bring this technology into our company, into a place where these companies that are guild signatories, that have relationships with the community creative, who aren’t just going to go and put you in a movie without your permission and without paying you – that can’t be said of a lot of tech platforms and other spaces where we don’t just abjure that technology and allow others to take it and dominate it and then weaken us.
“I’m already uncomfortable with some of the ways that some tech companies behave around image and likeness, and I think actually, like my thesis and what’s been confirmed, if you give that to people who actually make movies, you’re going to get much better results. And we did, and we did,” Affleck explained. “And like at Netflix, it’s like, ‘Hey, do you want to use this? Do you want to try this?’ This is a discrete set of tools. It’s not about creating fake people or replacing anyone. This is another cool publishing tool, and if you can see it or can tell what it is, you’ve ruined it. Just like a bad visual effect, just like a bad performance.
The star has been quietly working in the AI field for several years now, and earlier in 2026, Affleck sold his AI company InterPositive to Netflix for nearly $600 million. He directed, co-wrote and starred in Animalswhich follows a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped and he and his wife (Kerry Washington) pitch in to find the ransom.
In his long red carpet conversation with THRAffleck pointed out “we have a problem in Hollywood. It’s not AI, it’s never going to be able to do that, in my opinion,” instead pointing to problems with movie theater attendance, work stoppages and production tax cuts. He also highlighted his and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity company and the belief that “if successful, everyone is compensated very clearly.”
He said that InterPositive shares the same philosophy and that “if you’re a director or an actor and you contribute to something that is your art, then yes, if you choose to use this technology to train from that, you benefit from that intelligence. You don’t have to give it to the rest of the world. They’re not entitled to it, but you can use the technology if everyone is using it. If you want to, if you feel like it helps your film in some way or on the other, and there are places where it does.”
Affleck added that “the truth about AI that people don’t talk about is that it’s deeply and fundamentally limited in many ways. It’s not magic. It’s not super intelligence. It’s not sentient. It’s just old bullshit. And eventually we’ll look back and say, ‘Remember when people said it was going to be Terminator and these machines were geniuses?’
Animals is released in select theaters and begins streaming on Netflix on October 9.
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