Leonardo DiCaprio is joining the chorus of Hollywood A-Listers who have voiced their concerns and hopes for the artificial intelligence age.
On the day of his appointment as Time‘s Entertainer of the Year and Golden Globe nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the Academy Award-winning actor acknowledged to the magazine how AI may influence filmmaking, for better or for worse.
“It could be an enhancement tool for a young filmmaker to do something we’ve never seen before,” he said. “I think anything that is going to be authentically thought of as art has to come from the human being. Otherwise — haven’t you heard these songs that are mashups that are just absolutely brilliant and you go, ‘Oh my God, this is Michael Jackson doing The Weeknd,’ or ‘This is funk from the A Tribe Called Quest song “Bonita Applebum,” done in, you know, a sort of Al Green soul-song voice, and it’s brilliant.’ And you go, ‘Cool.’ But then it gets its 15 minutes of fame and it just dissipates into the ether of other internet junk. There’s no anchoring to it. There’s no humanity to it, as brilliant as it is.”
Moreover, he contemplated how cinema may change in the coming years, adding, “I was just thinking the other day, I wonder what the next most shocking thing is going to be in cinema. Because so much has been done that has moved the needle, and some of these directors are so talented right now and doing such a multitude of different things at the same time: What’s going to be the next thing that rattles people and shocks people cinematically?”
As entertainment industry stalwarts reckon with AI potentially encroaching on their livelihoods, numerous high-profile professionals — Guillermo del Toro, Celine Song and Denis Villeneuve among them — have slammed the technology and declared it has no place in the moviemaking process. Meanwhile, some, like James Cameron, have acknowledged how the tech can make technical aspects like VFX “cheaper”; however, like DiCaprio, he noted generative AI couldn’t replace human-made art.
“What generative AI can’t do is create something new that’s never been seen. If you think about it, the models — it’s a magic trick, what they can do is quite astonishing,” the Avatar director said. “But the models are trained on everything that’s ever been done before that; it can’t be trained on that which has never been done. So you will innately see, essentially, all of human art and human experience put into a blender, and you’ll get something that is kind of an average of that. So what you can’t have is that individual screenwriter’s unique lived experience and their quirks; you won’t find the idiosyncrasies of a particular actor.”