Emma Thompson is very good at many things — acting, screenwriting, penning children’s books — and in recent years, she’s also become quite accomplished at going viral. She did it again this week, during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with a furious (and furiously funny) profanity-laden dismissal of the increasingly inescapable scourge of generative artificial intelligence.
She wasn’t specifically talking about the high-end use of AI in filmmaking. Her irritation stemmed from the first step of the process: transferring her writing, done in longhand, into a Word document. With a flurry of f-bombs and mounting exasperation, she described how tired she is of the software asking if she’d like it to rewrite her work — a moment that perfectly captures the creeping intrusion of AI into tasks that once felt simple and organic.