Ashton Kutcher is getting dragged on social media again, but not for being good friends with a convicted or accused celebrity predator like Danny Masterson or Sean “Diddy” Combs.
This time, the “That ’70s Show” star and famous tech investor is being called out for touting advances in AI as the future of filmmaking, and essentially saying how great it will be to save money by no longer needing to employ stunt actors, writers, visual effects artists and other human beings to create stories and content, Deadline and Variety reported.
In a recent chat with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Los Angeles, Kutcher specifically talked up the benefits of Sora, OpenAI’s generative video tool, Deadline said. Apparently, the actor has used a beta version of it and found that “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,” Kutcher said. “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.”
Kutcher went on to explain how AI will make filmmaking significantly quicker and cheaper, suggesting that movies wouldn’t need location scouts, set designers or stunt actors anymore.
“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?” Kutcher said.
“To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher continued. “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).”
Kutcher also appeared to envision a day when visual effects artists would no longer be necessary, saying he used Sora to create footage of a runner trying to escape a desert sandstorm.
“I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it,” Kutcher said. “I, in five minutes, rendered a video of an ultramarathoner running across the desert being chased by a sandstorm. And it looks exactly like that.”
In fact, Kutcher said he expects that anyone will soon be able to use AI to make their own own custom, professional-quality movies.
“You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie,” he said. “Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”
Not surprisingly, Kutcher’s comments didn’t go over well among workers in an industry that is still reeling from the effects of last year’s strikes, when many actors and writers put AI at the top of their list of concerns about future job security and protecting the integrity of their art.
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Caitie Delaney, a former writer for the animated series “Rick and Morty,” immediately challenged Kutcher on X by writing how he was disregarding the contributions of “below-the-line” workers and “cannibalizing your own industry because you played Steve Jobs in an inferior movie and think you’re a tech genius now.”
“When you take ANY humans off of a collaborative and creative pursuit you literally lose the humanity,” Delaney continued. “A hollow, dumbass, pointless shell. TV will have the same artistic merit as dish soap.”
Delaney wasn’t the only writer to weigh in on Ashton’s comments, according to Deadline.
“It’s such an ignorant, shortsighted, selfcentered, shortterm cost vs longterm gain mindset,” said writer Ash Laser on X.
SAG-AFTRA member Damon Gonzalez also wrote on X: “Greed will always come first. Just because you can save money it should only be used at a minimum cost of human jobs. As consumers and filmmakers we must reject this garbage.”
Another screenwriter, J. Filiatraut, pondered the hostility Kutcher had engendered with his AI comments and wondered whether anyone on a film crew would still want to work with him.
“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 (expletive) starve,” Filiatraut said. “Gutsy choice, bud.”
