Ben Affleck has confirmed that Animals, the Netflix thriller he directed and stars in, was made with a lot of AI help. He said so on stage at Bloomberg's Screentime conference on Wednesday, ahead of the film's 9 October release.
The tools came from InterPositive, the AI company Affleck founded and Netflix bought for close to $600 million. He described starting from an open-source model and training it on thousands of hours of footage so that it would handle cinematic shots.
He would not say which scenes were touched. Pointing out the AI, he said, would be like a magician announcing the hidden rabbit before the act, and he wants to keep the illusion intact. He argued that Animals is a good, ethical test case precisely because it is a mid-budget human drama that barely needs visual effects.
He also played down the idea of a fully AI-generated feature arriving soon, saying the cost and complexity, and eventually the physics and energy involved, make film one of the fields least likely to be taken over. World of Reel's writer agreed on that point but predicted the secrecy will just send viewers hunting for the AI.
Animals stars Affleck as a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped, with Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun and Gillian Anderson; Connor McIntyre wrote it, with revisions by Billy Ray.
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