She’s on the front lines.
Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
Emma Thompson doesn’t want a Word document to put words in her mouth. On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Monday, October 27, the Oscar-winning actress and screenwriter shared that she feels an “intense irritation” about AI. She explained to Colbert that she writes longhand because she believes there is a “connection between the brain and the hands,” but will transfer her completed work to a computer afterward. “Recently, the Word document is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’” Thompson said, in an apparent reference to Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant Copilot. “And so I end up just going, ‘I don’t need you to fucking rewrite what I’ve just written! Will you fuck off? Just fuck off! I’m so annoyed.’” And speaking of the link between the brain and the body, Thompson’s clenched fists by the end of this story are certainly helpful at emphasizing her thoughts.
This isn’t the first time she’s gotten testy about technology. Thompson recalled that when she was writing the Academy Award–winning screenplay for the 1995 period drama Sense and Sensibility, there was a moment when the computer appeared to turn all of her writing into “hieroglyphs.” She went to Stephen Fry in her dressing gown, and it ultimately took him eight hours before he got the computer to spit out the script in “one long sentence.” Looking back, Thompson reflected that it felt like the machine had hidden her work “on purpose.” Basically, if humans and robots end up battling it out one day, we won’t be surprised to see Thompson on the front lines trying to get her lick back.
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