Hollywood

Ben Affleck’s Hidden AI Tests Hollywood’s New Rules on Disclosure

Ben Affleck says he used AI for lots of things in Animals and will not say where. After three years of strikes, union deals and new awards rules, Hollywood's argument is about who gets to know.

ukscreen 4 October 2026, 12:57

Ben Affleck in a navy suit speaking with photographers on the SXSW red carpet. — Ben Affleck. Photo: Nomoretitanic / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.

Ben Affleck has made a film with artificial intelligence and would prefer audiences not to look for it. At Bloomberg’s Screentime conference in Los Angeles on 30 September, the director and star of Animals, a kidnap thriller that reaches Netflix on 9 October, told the journalist Lucas Shaw: “I used [AI] for lots of things in that movie. I’m a little bit hesitant to point out what they are — or even talk about it — because in my business, we’re trying to foster the illusion of reality, right?”

He compared disclosure to a magician who walks on stage and announces “there’s another bunny under here”. He called the film “a very human movie”, described AI as “another form of computing” and dismissed the darker forecasts as “all this propaganda”. “I don’t worry about Skynet,” he said, “and I don’t think that it’s going to take over this business in any meaningful way.”

The director who sold the tools

Affleck’s position is unusual because he stands on both sides of the sale. He founded InterPositive in 2022. Netflix bought it on 5 March and made him a senior adviser; a regulatory filing in July put the price at about $587 million in cash. Animals, which he also co-wrote and produced, is a showcase for the technology on the platform that now owns it.

By the company’s own account the tools are modest. Netflix says the model was trained on a “proprietary dataset” filmed on a controlled soundstage, and that it deals with film-making technique and leaves performances alone: fixing continuity, correcting light, replacing backgrounds, supplying missing shots. Affleck says he built in “restraints to protect creative intent”. Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said new tools should not “replace the work of writers, directors, actors, and crews”. At Screentime, Affleck said productions using AI have “the same number of people. In fact, more people, technically, are being employed”. He called suspicion of Netflix’s motives “a very cynical view indeed”.

Why Hollywood will not take it on trust

Hollywood has spent three years building defences against exactly this kind of reassurance. Writers and actors struck for months in 2023, with AI among the central disputes, and won consent and payment for digital replicas of performers. When talent agencies showed interest in Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress” unveiled in September 2025, the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA said she “is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program” and spoke of “stolen performances to put actors out of work”. Guillermo del Toro told NPR that, asked for his stance on generative AI, his answer was: “I’d rather die.”

In February this year, after ByteDance launched its Seedance 2.0 video generator, the Motion Picture Association sent its first cease-and-desist letter to a major AI company, and Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance, Sony and Netflix sent letters of their own, Tech Times reported. The same report quotes the animation producer Joel Kuwahara telling the Los Angeles Times that studios let the tool be used “with a wink and a nod”. Public resistance and private adoption now run side by side. Netflix, which protested to ByteDance in February, bought InterPositive in March.

The new union contracts show where the fight has settled. SAG-AFTRA members ratified a four-year deal on 4 June, with 91.42 per cent in favour on a turnout of 19.25 per cent. Studios must now show “significant additional value” before a synthetic performer takes the place of a human, and the union gets notice and bargaining rights if such use grows, RedShark News reported; critics inside the union call the test vague. The Writers Guild’s 2026 agreement obliges companies to give the Guild “written notice” if they license writers’ work to train a commercial AI system.

The anxiety has numbers behind it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 185,200 jobs in film and video production in February 2026, down from 234,000 a decade earlier and about 100,000 below the peak of October 2022. The Bureau links the slide since 2023 to the strikes, and nobody has measured AI’s share. Affleck offered no figures for his claim that productions using AI employ more people.

Who gets to know

Read together, the safeguards share one design: each is a right to be told. Actors’ representatives are owed notice. Writers’ representatives are owed notice. Awards bodies have followed. The Academy’s rules for next March’s Oscars say acting must be “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” and that screenplays “must be human-authored”, and they allow the Academy to “request more information from the filmmaking team” about a film’s use of AI.

That is where Affleck’s magic trick meets its limit. If the tools that replaced backgrounds and supplied missing shots in Animals count as generative AI, any Golden Globes entry for the film would have to say so, and the Academy could ask. The disclosure would go to the awards bodies. Every rule Hollywood has written so far sends the information to an institution, a union or a voting body. None sends it to the people Affleck was talking about: the audience.

The oldest argument in the business

Affleck’s strongest point is historical. Cinema has always hidden its workings, and digital repair is decades old. In 2015 George Miller told UKScreen that if a light stand or a second camera strayed into a shot, “you can erase it”. Affleck places AI in the same line, as one more of the “technological improvements we’ve made in the film and television business”.

The comparison breaks in two places. A magician owns his rabbit; a film’s illusion is the work of hundreds of people, and the tools in question act on their work. And a magician does not sell the hat. When the person asking for trust also sold the technology to the distributor, silence is a commercial position.

Hollywood’s resistance to AI has moved a long way since the picket lines of 2023. The fear then was replacement. The demand now, written into two union contracts and two sets of awards rules, is to be shown where the machines are. Affleck’s refusal lands on that line. Animals will be judged as a thriller on 9 October. It will also be an early test of whether “trust me” is an answer the industry still accepts.

Sources: The Playlist; World of Reel; Fox News; The A.V. Club; Netflix; TechCrunch; TheWrap; NBC News; NPR (via NEPM); Tech Times; Los Angeles Issue; RedShark News; Writers Guild of America West; US Bureau of Labor Statistics; Euronews; Gizmodo.