The 52-year-old actor believes AI technology can replicate the "more laborious, less creative" aspects of filmmaking - but Ben insists he isn't worried about AI taking over Hollywood.
Speaking at CNBC's Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit, Affleck explained: "AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare.
"The function of having two actors or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct … that is something that currently entirely alludes AI's capability and ... will for a meaningful period of time.
"What AI is going to do is dis-intermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people want to make 'Good Will Huntings' to go out and make it."
Affleck observed that AI is great at "imitating". However, he suggested the technology doesn't have the power to produce creative, original ideas.
The award-winning star - who has also enjoyed significant success as a director - said: "AI is a craftsman at best. Craftsmen can learn to make Stickley Furniture by sitting down next to somebody and seeing what their technique is and imitating. That's how large video models, large language models, basically work. They're just cross pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.
"Craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop. And I think knowing when to stop is going to be a very difficult thing for AI to learn because it's taste. And also lack of consistency, lack of controls, lack of quality."
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