Ben Affleck (33:52)
Yeah, we've been spending time looking at this. Like my belief is sort of like, what's going to happen with electricity? Well, a lot of shit's going to happen with electricity. Some of it's going to be good, some of it's going to change stuff. Some of it's going to be like, you know, this is going to be, you know, shit that kills a bunch of people. Like it's opening a door that you can't, you know, say, well, talk about it in a kind of a blanket way. But I think with what I see is, for example, if you try to get Chatgpt or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature it goes to the mean to the average and it's not reliable. And it's. I mean, I just can't stand to see what writes now. It's a useful tool if you're a writer and you're going, oh, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up. Or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets. And it can give you some examples of that. 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 like from Holcomb, like Tilly Norwood. Like, that's bullshit. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's not. I think it actually, it turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. And really what it is, is going to be a tool just like sort of visual effects. And yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Your. Those laws already exist. You can't. I can't sell your fucking 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. And the unions are going to. The guilds are going to manage this where it's like, okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, 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. It doesn't save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're gonna focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside. That's useful. Just like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn used to be. Like driving their car and there's a wind blowing a painting behind them. It looked goofy. Now in computer generated, people use a lot of computer generated stu. And some of it is going to replace just that. Like, instead of 500 guys in Singapore, you know, making $2 an hour to render all the graphics for a superhero movie, there's going to be able to do that a lot easier. There's already laws around and guild guidelines around, like how many union extras you have to use. But also, we've been tiling extras. Like, there weren't a million orcs in Middle Earth, you know what I mean? There aren't Invictus, there weren't all those people in the stadium. Like, that's something we've been doing. It kind of feels to me like the thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense 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 a adoption is slow, it's incremental. 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. Well, 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, like, oh, you know, as soon as we do the next model, it's going to scale up and be three times as good. Except that actually chatgpt5 about 25 times percent better than chatgpt4 and costs about four times as much in the way of electricity and data. So those nicely. It's like plateauing. The early AI, the line went up very steeply and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because. And yes, it'll get better, but it's going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people were like, fuck this, we want ChatGPT4. Because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to, like, as like companion bots to chat with at night. And so there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to, like, focus on an AI friend who's, you know, telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and being sycophantic. But that's sort of a side issue, I think, for this particular purpose, like, the way I see the technology and what it's good at and what it's not, it's going to be good at filling in all the places that are expensive and burdensome and they make it harder to do it. And it's always going to rely fundamentally on the human artistic aspects of it.
