Ashton Kutcher may end up eating his words when it comes to touting the advances in AI.
In a recent chat with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at L.A.’s Berggruen Salon, the That ’70s Show actor talked up the benefits of Sora, OpenAI’s generative video tool. Apparently, he’s played around with it and found that “you can generate any footage that you want.”
“You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real. It still makes mistakes. It still doesn’t quite understand physics. … But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds. In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100?” he continued at the salon, which was touted as a discussion about how “technology is disrupting the film industry and changing the way creativity is approached.”
“To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher continued. “Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI].”
He also talked about how advances are such that creatives would “be able to render a whole movie. You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie. Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”
Former Rick and Morty scribe Caitie Delaney immediately took aim at Kutcher on X by writing how he was snubbing below-the-line workers and “cannibalizing your own industry because you played Steve Jobs in an inferior movie and think you’re a tech genius now.”
“When you take ANY humans off of a collaborative and creative pursuit you literally lose the humanity,” she continued. “A hollow, dumbass, pointless shell. TV will have the same artistic merit as dish soap.”
Delaney wasn’t the only writer to weigh in on Ashton’s comments.
I overhear it at my bar, hedgefund bros & stocks. Departments in my girl’s corporate job. Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher,” wrote X user Ash Laser. “It’s such an ignorant, shortsighted, selfcentered, shortterm cost vs longterm gain mindset. You’re training it to replace YOU. And your kid’s dreams.”
“Imagine being Ashton Kutcher stepping onto a film set now, after coming out and advocating for all those crew people to lose their jobs and fucking starve,” added screenwriter J. Filiatraut. “Gutsy choice, bud.”
“I can watch my own movie right now via making my own movies, but I still watch other movies,” said writer/director Steve Rudzinski. “What a weird take.”
“You could probably make an Ashton Kutcher movie with OpenAI’s Sora, but you couldn’t make a good movie with it,” added writer/comedian Sean O’Connor.
“I’d rather render a whole different Ashton Kutcher,” wrote Brett Nicholson.
Last week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos tried to deny claims that AI threatens Hollywood’s creative jobs.
“I have more faith in humans than that. I really do. I don’t believe that an A.I. 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,” he told The New York Times. “A.I. is not going to take your job. The person who uses A.I. well might take your job.”
“A.I. is a natural kind of advancement of things that are happening in the creative space today, anyway,” he continued. “Volume stages did not displace on-location shooting. Writers, directors, editors will use A.I. as a tool to do their jobs better and to do things more efficiently and more effectively,” he continued. “And in the best case, to put things onscreen that would be impossible to do.”
