Emma Thompson made a gaffe when host Stephen Colbert asked her about her feelings about Hollywood’s “coming AI revolution” on “The Late Show.” Thompson, an Oscar and BAFTA-winning screenwriter for his 1995 film adaptation of Sense & Sensibility, is especially furious when an AI chatbot asks him to rewrite his work.
Regarding his feelings toward AI, Thompson said, “I’m extremely frustrated. I can’t even begin to express my feelings.” “I’m writing with a long hand on a pad because I believe there’s a connection between the brain and the hand, so that’s very important to me. And when I write something, I put it in a Word document. And these days, the Word document is always saying, ‘Can you rewrite that?’ And I end up just saying, ‘I don’t need to rewrite what I just wrote, can you stop?!’ Stop it already! I’m very frustrated.
When Colbert asked Thompson to show the computer the adapted version of the Oscar, Thompson replied, “I don’t think you’d mind.” And she said technology has long complicated her screenwriting process.
“When I finished writing ‘Sense & Sensibility’ on the computer, I came back from the bathroom to find that the entire script had been turned into hieroglyphs,” Thompson recalled. “The script was completely gone. I panicked. I didn’t have another copy, so I went to Stephen Fry’s house. And it took Stephen eight hours to come up with one long sentence. I had to start over. The computer stole it and hid it… as if on purpose.”
Thompson is the latest Oscar winner to speak out against AI in Hollywood. Director Guillermo del Toro, whose latest film, Frankenstein, will be released on Netflix on November 7th, recently told NPR that he would rather die than have to use AI in the filmmaking process.
“I’m not interested in AI, especially generative AI, and I never will be,” del Toro said. “I’m 61 years old, and I hope I never show any interest in using it until it cries.…Someone wrote me an email the other day and said, ‘What’s your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, “I’d be better off dead.” ”
Watch Thompson’s full interview on “The Late Show” in the video below.
