{"id":377640,"date":"2026-04-02T04:03:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T04:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/377640\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T04:03:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T04:03:11","slug":"we-all-know-what-ai-mogul-ben-affleck-means-when-he-talks-about-cutting-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/377640\/","title":{"rendered":"We all know what AI mogul Ben Affleck means when he talks about “cutting costs”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in March<\/a>, we reported on a somewhat surprising move at the intersection between big streaming, big tech, and big \u201cGuy who plays an accountant who kills people\u201d news: Ben Affleck had successfully sold an AI startup called InterPositive to Netflix, which had already begun to use its technology to generate scenes for some of its original productions. Now, Deadline\u00a0has fresh reporting<\/a> that dips into some of the messaging that Affleck and his cohort used when first designing their little cash cow, including a lot of focus on the always-fun-in-this-context idea of using AI for \u201ccutting costs,\u201d which, wouldn\u2019t you know it, always seems to zero in on those costs that go into paying human beings to do skilled labor on a movie.<\/p>\n

Specifically, we can now all read a patent application<\/a> that Affleck filed back in 2024, in which he identified which \u201ccosts\u201d\u2014i.e., jobs\u2014his technology could help its clients most successfully eliminate, including offering a 50 percent reduction in a production\u2019s visual effects budget, and similarly large savings on things like set dressing and background actors or extras. Big chunks of the patent fall into technical details mostly concerned with how you teach Affleck\u2019s AI to \u201ccompose\u201d shots, which we\u2019ll leave to the more technically minded out there to parse. But we are fascinated by a portion that discusses recruiting \u201cambassadors\u201d to help normalize AI usage by directors, while emphasizing that the aim is to \u201cenhance the creative process without supplanting the creative vision and direction of human filmmakers.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this is worth tracking in part because Affleck\u2019s communications about his company have, in recent months, moved aggressively away from talking about \u201ccost\u201d concerns, presumably because the marks have started cracking that particular code. These days, his language puts a lot of emphasis on \u201ccreators,\u201d a designation that appears, as far as we can tell, to refer only to jobs that Ben Affleck himself has held in Hollywood, like writing, directing, and acting. (Non-background variety.) \u201cWe need to preserve what makes storytelling human, which is judgment,\u201d he said in a statement when Netflix paid him what could add up to as much as $600 million for his AI company, a statement that makes absolutely zero sense when you think about all of the thousands of moments of individual human judgment that will be lost as AI use eliminates skilled below-the-line jobs. (But which tracks much better if you have it in your head that films just sort of magically flow down from a singular vision pouring out of a singular dude, who looks and sounds a lot like a singular Ben Affleck.) It\u2019s worth noting that Affleck has said this part a bit louder in the past, back before his ties to AI tech were quite as well known: During a CNBC appearance about AI back in 2024, he stated that \u201cI wouldn\u2019t like to be in the visual effects business. They\u2019re in trouble because what used to cost a lot of money is going to cost a lot less. And it\u2019s going to hammer that space, and it already is. And maybe it shouldn\u2019t take a thousand people to render something.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in March, we reported on a somewhat surprising move at the intersection between big streaming, big tech,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-377640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}