Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos isn’t getting too worried about the rise of artificial intelligence in Hollywood. During a recent interview with The New York Times, Sarandos said he doubts AI platforms will ever replace Hollywood professions such as screenwriters.
“I have more faith in humans than that. I really do. I don’t believe that an AI program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or is going to replace a great performance, or that we won’t be able to tell the difference,” Sarandos said. “AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI well might take your job.”
Sarandos elaborated on the topic by calling AI a “natural kind of advancement of things that are happening in the creative space today, anyway.”
“Volume stages did not displace on-location shooting,” he said. “Writers, directors, editors will use AI as a tool to do their jobs better and to do things more efficiently and more effectively. And in the best case, to put things onscreen that would be impossible to do.”
“Think about this gigantic leap from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated animation, and look how many more people animation employs today than it used to,” Sarandos continued. “Remember how everybody fought home video? For several decades, the studios wouldn’t license movies to television. So every advancement in technology in entertainment has been fought and then ultimately has turned out to grow the business. I don’t know that this would be any different.”
Sarandos’ thoughts are not too far off from what blockbuster filmmaker James Cameron said last summer. In an interview with CTV News, the Oscar winner expressed doubt over AI bots being able to write “a good story.”
According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”
“Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for best screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously,” Cameron added.
Head over to The New York Times’ website to read Sarandos’ full interview.