Leonardo DiCaprio Says AI Can Never Be Art Because It Lacks Humanity – Variety

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Leonardo DiCaprio expressed his doubts regarding AI taking over Hollywood during an interview with Time magazine, which has named the Oscar winner its entertainer of the year. While DiCaprio “mourns the fact that talented and experienced people could lose their jobs” because of AI, as reported by Time, he also believes AI is incapable of having humanity and thus can’t be “authentically” considered art.

“It could be an enhancement tool for a young filmmaker to do something we’ve never seen before,” DiCaprio said of AI. “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.”

Many filmmakers in Hollywood have come out swinging against AI in recent weeks. Guillermo del Toro made headlines at the Gotham Awards for saying “fuck AI.” Speaking to NPR a month prior, the Oscar winner said he’d rather die than have to use AI in his movies.

“AI, particularly generative AI — I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested,” del Toro said. “I’m 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. … The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I’d rather die.’”

James Cameron recently told ComicBook.com that he banned the use of generative AI when making his “Avatar” sequels, explaining: “We honor and celebrate actors. We don’t replace actors.”

Emma Thompson, meanwhile, lost it on “The Late Show” in October when host Stephen Colbert asked about her feelings regarding “the coming AI revolution” in Hollywood. Thompson, an Oscar-winning screenwriter thanks to “Sense & Sensibility,” is especially irate when it comes to AI chatbots asking to rewrite her work.

“Intense irritation. I cannot begin to tell you,” Thompson said about her feelings on AI. “Because I write longhand on a pad, old script actually, because I believe that there is a connection between the brain and the hand. So it’s very important to me. And then when I’ve written something, I will put it into a Word document. And recently, the Word document is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’ And so I end up just saying, ’I don’t need you to rewrite what I’ve just written, will you fuck off?! Just fuck off!” I’m so annoyed.

Head over to Time magazine’s website to read DiCaprio’s cover story in its entirety.