Ben Affleck Uses ‘Succession’ As Example When Talking About AI

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Ben Affleck, by all accounts, is an incredibly intelligent dude. Not only is he an Academy Award-winning director, but there are rumors of him having an IQ in the range of 155-160, and a litany of anecdotes about him being the smartest guy in the room. He’s also survived more career highs and lows than perhaps any other A-lister out there (that doesn’t involve breaking the law).

Frankly, if you listen to Ben Affleck talk whenever he isn’t acting, you can tell how intelligent he is through the sheer intensity with which he speaks, as if his head is about to explode because it’s bursting with an idea he just can’t wait to get out.

The latest example of Affleck’s mad genius came during CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 event earlier this week, in which he cooked up an insane fan-fiction ending to Succession in which Kendall Roy runs off and “has an affair” with his old buddy Stewy while discussing the potential of AI in filmmaking.

“AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession where you could say, ‘I’ll pay you $30 and can you make me a 45-minute episode where like Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy?’ and it’ll do it,” Affleck said. “And it will be a little janky and a little weird but it will know the sass and those actors and it will remix it in effect. That’s the value long-term.”

 

“It’s kinda sweet (and maybe a little telling) that Ben Affleck’s ideal ending for “Succession” is where the divorced, failed son with addiction issues – whose ambition far outstrips his performance – runs away from a toxic industry with his more successful childhood bestie,” one viral response to the video said.

It also opened the door for a joke about his famed friendship with his longtime pal Matt Damon, with whom he founded the production company Artists Equity in November 2022.

Beyond the out-of-left-field Succession example, however, Affleck — in a legitimate display of his intelligence — further laid out his beliefs about AI in Hollywood, saying that it’s more of an imitator than a creator and can be used as a tool for the more tedious aspects of the industry.

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

“What AI is going to do is going to dis-intermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs 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 Hunting‘s to go out and make it,” he continued.

The director of films such as Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo then made a salient point about AI being a craftsman that can imitate but is incapable of creating anything “new.”

“Look, AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make Stickley Furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That’s how large video models and large language models basically work. Library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it in context, right? But they’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.”

Affleck’s next film, a sequel to his 2016 action thriller The Accountant, is set to hit movie theaters in the United States on April 25, 2025. Filmmaker Gavin O’Connor returned to direct, as have Affleck’s previous co-stars Jon Bernthal, J. K. Simmons, and Cynthia Addai-Robinson.

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