People Are Only Just Discovering How Smart Ben Affleck Is, And I Guess It’s Better Late Than Never

Ben was just 25 years old when he won the Academy Award, with Matt 27 and the second youngest winner after Ben. 

The two stars famously wrote the impressive script when they were struggling actors living together in Boston, with the movie proving to be the big break that catapulted both of them to global superstardom.

Despite this, every so often, social media users are left shocked when a clip of Ben, now 52, emerges online that highlights his intelligence. 

Speaking with CNBC at the Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit earlier this month, Ben was asked if it would become possible for Netflix to make a movie out of “a bunch of actors that are completely recreated.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Ben launched into a lengthy and impassioned speech that explained why this is unlikely to happen any time soon. 

“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,” Ben began.

“AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan, it cannot write you Shakespeare,” he went on. “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 then detailed the positive use of AI in filmmaking, explaining: “What AI is going to do is disintermediate the more laborious, less creative, and 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.”

“Craftsmanship is knowing how to work, art is knowing when to stop,” Ben added. “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.”

He then 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 [has].”

“But it’s not going to replace human beings making films,” Ben 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,” Ben went on. “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.”

“I would be so mad if I directed as many good movies as Affleck has and people still thought I was stupid lol,” somebody else joked.

Another added: “At 21 Affleck wrote an academy award winning script about not underestimating the intelligence of a guy like him. He’s also one of the most articulate people in Hollywood on geopolitics (he studied Middle Eastern Affairs in college and won another academy award for Argo).”

While one popular tweet quips: “Everyone is so surprised whenever Affleck is revealed to be quite intelligent. Why did you think there were so many candid shots of him out there looking miserable?”

In this 21-year-old video, Ben says: “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. Those 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 went on. “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,” he concluded. “The technology is not quite there yet, but it will be, I’ll say, within the next five years.”

Four years after Ben made his comments, Netflix launched its streaming service. One year after that, Spotify launched in select European countries.