Paul Feig derided AI as technology that “literally no one of us asked for,” framing it as merely an “amalgamation of what we leave behind.”
In contrast, he said, “We are HI. We are human intelligence.” Humanity, he said, is “our superpower,” and people need to “keep living, keep telling your stories, and keep being who you are: unique individuals who make our future a better one.”
The writer and director, whose credits include features The Housemaid and Bridesmaids and numerous TV series, made the remarks in accepting a career achievement award at the Nantucket Film Festival, which wraps up today.
While Hollywood’s major above-the-line unions recently struck contract renewals with the studios and streamers, averting a repeat of the AI-influenced 2023 strikes, uneasiness about copyright and the future of work persists. Feig has plenty of company in his deep AI suspicions, A-listers like Ben Affleck, Jon Favreau and James Cameron have publicly endorsed its potential, provided that certain guardrails are in place.
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“As far as I’m concerned, storytelling is as important as the food that we eat and the air that we breathe,” Feig said. “Today, a lot of us of the storytelling business are being confronted by a rather terrifying technological development: AI. Now, I have my own personal thoughts about this, namely, that it’s technology literally none of us asked for, but one that billionaires are investing huge amounts of money in to reduce their workforce and raise their profits.”
Feig insisted he wasn’t raising the topic “to be a purveyor of a doom. I’m here to try and bring us some kind of reassurance, because AI is not us. It’s not who we are. It’s who we were years ago, months ago, days ago, hours ago, minutes ago. All AI can do is take what we’ve done, and log in, and scrape it, mix, match it, and turn it into something that seems original, but it’s not original. It’s our old ideas. It’s our old experiences. It’s the things that we said, and wrote, and lived through already. So those things are only what makes us who we are at this moment. Until the day we die, we keep changing. We keep evolving. We have a new experiences, new thoughts, new ideas. We are living, breathing, human beings, who face infinite choices and possibilities.”
AI, he continued, “was in our past. We live in our present, and we will live in our future. And all AI can do is follow and try to sound and be like us. But it will never be us. It can only be an amalgamation of what we leave behind.”
Storytellers – a broad heading, which Feig said extends beyond the entertainment business – must “keep moving forward, keep experiencing life, love, and friendship, and challenges, and joy, and sadness, and all the things that have brought us to where we are, because we are not AI. We are not artificial intelligence, we are HI. We are human intelligence. And while there are times when it seems like it could be in short supply, it is our superpower, I swear, and we were all, we are all superheroes. So keep living, keep telling your stories, and keep being who you are: unique individuals who make our future a better one.”
Feig’s speech drew rousing cheers from the crowd at the festival, which also handed out career honors to Chloë Sevigny and multihyphenate duo Rashida Jones and Will McCormack.