Not just anyone or anything can make it in Hollywood, according to Justine Bateman.
The former “Family Ties” actress and accredited director is adamant artificial intelligence should not have its shot.
“I think AI has no place in Hollywood at all. To me, tech should solve problems that humans have,” Batemen told Fox News Digital. “Using ChatGPT or any … software that’s using AI to write screenplays, using that in place of a writer is not solving a problem. We don’t have a lack of writers. We don’t have a lack of actors. We don’t have a lack of directors. We don’t have a lack of talented people.”
Bateman’s comments come amid the Hollywood writers’ strike, with AI being one of the many concerns. Bateman says the convergence of artificial intelligence and the entertainment industry is negatively impacting human nature.
“I think AI has no place in Hollywood at all. To me, tech should solve problems that humans have.”
— Justine Bateman
“To ask a computer programmer … to write a letter that you wanted to write or to write an essay for you or to write a script for you is just like, ‘Wow, that’s so much a part of being a human, is to express yourself through writing or artwork or whatever it is. … That’s the saddest thing to me is … just people pulling away from being human.”
Bateman also believes that AI poses a monetary concern, one rooted in greed.
“Incredible amounts of money are made off of our work. Incredible profits are made off of our work. But what if you could make even greater profit? What if you could get rid of the pesky overhead of paying for the directors and the actors and the writers and the locations, the production, the post-production? What if you just get rid of all of that? Can you imagine how much larger your profit could be? That’s the road we’re going down,” Bateman says.
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“So that’s been going on for a long time,” Bateman said, “but the difference now is that AI is so much more advanced. You can take advantage. … So you can take advantage of those scans more completely than you could five years ago.”
In the upcoming film, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” artificial intelligence is used to reimagine Harrison Ford’s face as if he were still 35 years old.
Justine Bateman and actor Noah Wylie were supporting the writers’ strike in Hollywood earlier this month. (Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images)
Given the current climate that includes a nearly month-long writers’ strike spearheaded by the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA), Bateman calls attention to a problem many writers’ fear — their work will be stolen.
“It’s more complex than what I’m about to say, but you basically … feed it a bunch of information, you give it a task and then, based on the information it has, it gives you the result,” she says of AI programming. “It accomplishes the task you gave it. … If you’re asking it to write a screenplay, what are you training it on? What are you feeding it? Other people’s scripts. That’s plagiarism. … The use of it is going to have an incredibly bad effect — disastrous effect on the entertainment business.”
The WGA has a litany of concerns and requests for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Per its website, the WGA has specific proposals with regard to artificial intelligence, including the “regulation of AI on minimum basic agreement (MBA)-covered projects; AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.”
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However, Bateman argues that’s simply not the case because she knows how to write.
“I don’t need an AI program to, like, come up with stuff for me,” Bateman said. “Like, that just sounds ridiculous to me. It’s like [to] have somebody work out for you or something if you enjoy working out, right?