Remember when Ashton Kutcher was reportedly trying to keep a low profile so everyone would forget how close friends he was with Diddy? Imagine poking your head up just to say this nonsense!
The That ’70s Show alum sat down with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt for some tech talk. In the filmed convo, he gushed about OpenAI‘s new generative video tool, Sora. Apparently he has access to a beta version and wants the world to know just how excited he is about what it can do. He explained:
“You can generate any footage that you want. You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real. It still makes mistakes. It still doesn’t quite understand physics… But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds. In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”
First, we just have to say this is the same hand-waving we always hear from AI proponents. “Sure, except for the extra fingers and teeth, it looks great!” LOLz!
But it was the next part that has everyone fuming! He wondered:
“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars. Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI].”
What’s the problem? Well, what it sounds like he’s really asking is, why pay all those little people below the line? As we often remind people who don’t live in Tinseltown, the great majority of folks who make movies aren’t movie stars or famous directors. They’re normal working stiffs banging away living paycheck to paycheck. Based off these quotes, it sounds like he wants to cut out all the location scouts, camera operators, second unit directors, gaffers, etc. — and oh yeah, stunt performers, too, for good measure!
Why not? He’s the mOviE sTaR, he’ll be just fine with his millions of dollars. Who cares if the entire industry collapses as long as interns can churn out terrible, soulless movie-type products from cubicles? Gross. And to say this just months out from a huge Hollywood strike over the issue of studios trying to replace humans with AI. Oof.
The backlash came fast and hard, with people in and out of the industry raking him over the coals for his techbro, anti-worker take:
“Ashton Kutcher gotta calm the f**k down. he’s always up to something nobody wants him to do”
“He said f**k those below the line poors”
“Imagine being Ashton Kutcher stepping onto a film set now, after coming out and advocating for all those crew people to lose their jobs and f**king starve. Gutsy choice, bud.”
“I fully believe that this is true for movies that are about as good as Ashton Kutcher can think of.”
“There are plenty of great writers and great actors making great movies. Not Hollywood’s fault you aren’t one of them.”
“F**king loser behavior, cannibalizing your own industry because you played Steve Jobs in an inferior movie and think you’re a tech genius now. Write some more rape apologist letters brother and stay the hell out of it”
Savage. And 100% fair. What do YOU think of Ashton trying to kill his own industry with robots?
