Ashton Kutcher Speaks out After His Opinion on Generative AI Sparks Backlash
The ‘That ’70s Show’ star’s opinions on AI in the moviemaking industry drew backlash.
Ashton Kutcher is doubling down on his opinion about OpenAI’s generative video tool, Sora, and its place in the future of filmmaking. After his comments about AI and the film and television landscape sparked backlash from people who felt he was advocating for a shift that would end up reducing jobs for creatives, the That ’70s Show actor took to X (formerly Twitter) to clarify his stance.
“I don’t think AI will replace the film industry or creative arts. It’s an amazing tool that we should learn to work with to become more prolific and efficient as artist,” he wrote on June 6. “In the same way we use Avid, final draft, greenscreen, Led bg and other technical tools. Acting like it doesn’t exist will be catastrophic.”
He continued in subsequent posts, “Jobs will change, denying that is turning a blind eye to facts. there use to be someone that taped the film together. there use to be someone that checked the gate. … we need to be prepared and understand whats coming.”
Kutcher, who is married to fellow actor Mila Kunis, previously shared his thoughts on OpenAI’s generative text-to-video tool during a conversation with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Los Angeles, calling a beta version he has “pretty amazing.” The Ranch actor added, “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.”
He continued that the tool could reduce production costs by creating footage that is currently made by professionals in the industry. “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,” Kutcher said. “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 noted that Hollywood would be able to “render a whole movie” using the tool. “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.”
He continued, “What’s going to happen is there is going to be more content than there are eyeballs on the planet to consume it. So any one piece of content is only going to be as valuable as you can get people to consume it. And so, thus the catalyzing ‘water cooler’ version of something being good, the bar is going to have to go way up, because why are you going to watch my movie when you could just watch your own movie?”
