People Are Once Again Realizing Just How Smart Ben Affleck Is After He Perfectly Articulated The Reality Of AI In Hollywood

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Every once in a while, the internet is left genuinely surprised to learn just how intelligent and well-informed Ben Affleck is, and sure as the sun will rise, 2026’s moment has arrived.

For reference, Ben remains the youngest ever winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, which he won back in 1998 for his and his best friend Matt Damon’s critically acclaimed movie Good Will Hunting. Ben was just 25 years old at the time, and Matt was 27 — the second youngest winner after Ben.

The two men famously wrote the seriously impressive script when they were struggling actors living together in Boston, and this was the movie that ended up catapulting them both to global superstardom — and Ben's smarts have been on display ever since.

For example, in 2003, Ben was asked about his thoughts on the future of movies and technology — and he correctly predicted that subscription-based apps for movies and music would eventually surface.

In a 23-year-old video that has aged incredibly well, Ben said: “I think some annual subscription-based system is one that works. You have the music business, a 3.4 billion-dollar-a-year business, which is largely about 1.7 million people in the country spending $200 a year. That same people would spend $200 each year to have access to basically the entire library of existing music.”

“I believe that paradigm is the most effective,” he continued. “It’ll be movies-on-demand, but it’ll be a tiered structure. If you want to watch it first weekend, maybe it won’t be available first weekend, but then, if you want to watch it, you’ll pay more. Then, as it goes to another stage of its release, it’ll become less expensive.”

“There’s a lot more adoption that has to happen, technologically speaking, right now before people can watch movies [on demand] in terms of PC, web connection,” Ben concluded at the time. “The technology is not quite there yet, but it will be, I’ll say, within the next five years.”

X @tbputera / X @jorilallo / CNBC / Via Twitter: @tbputera

For reference, Netflix's streaming service did not launch until four years after Ben made these comments — with Spotify launching in select European countries another year after that.

More recently, in November 2024, Ben was asked about AI when speaking with CNBC at the Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit. Specifically, Ben was asked if it’d become possible for Netflix to make a movie out of “a bunch of actors that are completely recreated.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the star launched into a lengthy and impassioned speech that detailed exactly why this is unlikely to happen any time soon. He began: “A. That’s not possible now. B. Will it be possible in the future? Highly unlikely. C. The movies will be one of the last things, if everything gets replaced, to be replaced by AI.”

“AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan, it cannot write you Shakespeare,” he explained. “The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room, and the taste to discern and construct something, that currently entirely eludes AI’s capability, and I think it will for a meaningful period of time.”

Ben went on to detail the positive side of AI in filmmaking, explaining: “What AI is going to do is disintermediate the more laborious, less creative, and, you know, more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow cost to be brought down. That will lower the barrier to entry that will allow more voices to be heard. That will make it easier for the people who want to make Good Will Huntings to go out and make it.”

“Look, AI is a craftsman at best,” he said. “A craftsman can learn how to make Stickley furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating… Craftsmanship is knowing how to work, art is knowing when to stop. I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for AI to learn because it’s taste. Also; lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality.”

CNBC / Via Twitter: @jorilallo

Ben even acknowledged that some areas of filmmaking will be impacted much sooner than actors and writers, admitting: “I wouldn’t like to be in the visual effects business, they’re in trouble because what costs a lot of money is now going to cost a lot less. It’s going to hammer that space and it already is.”

“But it’s not going to replace human beings making films,” he reiterated. “It may make your background more convincing, it can change the color of your shirt, it can fix mistakes that you’ve made. You might be able to get two seasons of House of the Dragon in a year instead of one, and if that happens, according to macroeconomics in cultures where they’re basically competing, what should happen is with the same demand, and the same span, they should just make more shows. Now you can just watch more episodes, and eventually, AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession. Where you can say: ‘I’ll pay $30, and you can make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy, and it’ll do it. And it’ll be a little janky and a little bit weird, but it’ll know those actors, and it will remix it.”

At the time, people were blown away by Ben’s articulate and well-rounded response, and the conversation has erupted once again after Ben was asked about AI in an interview while promoting his latest movie, The Rip. During his and Matt’s joint appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe asked the stars about AI stealing people’s likeness and writing movies entirely, to which Matt said: “It gets really weird, but this is actually an area of expertise for him,” gesturing at Ben — who was more than happy to lead the conversation.

“We've been spending time looking at this,” Ben began. “We all talk about it in a kind of blanket way, but I think 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. I just can't even stand to see what it writes now.”

“It’s a useful tool if you're a writer and you're going: ‘Ah, I'm trying to set something up where somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets…’ and it can give you some examples of that,” he went on. “I actually don't think it's very likely that it's going to be able to write anything meaningful or that it's going to be making movies from whole cloth. That's bullshit, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it.”

“It’s going to be a tool, just like visual effects, and it needs to have language around it,” Ben continued. “You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that; you can watermark it, those laws already exist. 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.”

He then shared how AI could end up being useful in filmmaking, saying that instead of going to the North Pole to shoot a scene, AI can make the scene look as though it was set in the North Pole. He explained: “Save us a lot of money, a lot of time, we're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our asses off out there and running back inside — that's useful.” Ben went on to compare this development to how filmmaking developed decades ago, such as driving a car in front of a green screen and using wind machines.

In the same vein, Ben pointed out that while AI may end up increasing how many background actors appear in a scene, this is also not a new concept. He said: “We've been tiling extras; there weren't a million orcs in Middle-earth, you know what I mean? Invictus, there weren't all those people in the stadium. That's something we've been doing.”

Offering words of reassurance, he added: “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 that adoption is slow. It's incremental.”

Ben theorized that the idea that AI will take over comes from the people who are investing in AI and trying to overstate the value of it as a company. He said: “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.”

“The argument that: ‘As soon as we do the next model, it’s going to scale up. It’s going to be three times as good,’” Ben continued. “Except that ChatGPT5 is about 25 percent better than ChatGPT4 and costs about four times as much in the way of electricity and data. The early AI, the line went up very steeply, now it’s sort of leveling off. It’ll get better, but it’s going to be really expensive to get better, and a lot of people will be like: ‘Fuck this, we want ChatGPT4.’”

“The vast majority of people who use AI are using it as companion bots to chat with at night and stuff,” Ben concluded. “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 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 a side issue… It’s going to be good at filling in all the places that are expensive and burdensome, and they make it harder to do, and it's always going to rely fundamentally on the human artistic aspects of it.”

In case you missed it, this clip has gone incredibly viral after it was posted to X, with many once again left stunned by Ben’s considered and well-articulated points surrounding AI. Quote-tweeting the video, one person wrote: “Honestly everytime Ben affleck talks the weird realization is that he's not stupid. He's always thoughtful and just genuinely not stupid? It's always startling.”

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