Cate Blanchett Weighs In on AI Debate

Published: September 11, 2024

Cate Blanchett Weighs In on AI Debate

By Movieguide® Contributor

Actress Cate Blanchett weighed in on the AI debate and explained why she believes human actors can never be fully replaced by the technology.

“The thing I do feel profoundly, though, about AI is that the thing we feat most and disregard most and put to the back of our mind most is our mortality,” Blanchett said. “We know that our time here is finite, and that is something that AI will never understand. It can imitate it, but it doesn’t understand that deep existential dread, and it doesn’t understand the preciousness of each moment in its cellular makeup, not that it necessarily has cellular makeup yet. That is something that can’t be replicated.”

While Blanchett believes the technology will be heavily implemented in the future, she thinks projects will only be successful if they keep a focus on the human experience.

“I’m very proud of the industry, actually, for going on strike about [AI],” she said. “We’re a very front-facing industry. And if you think about before the strike, people were talking about it, but it was not a dinner table, mainstream conversation. I think it’s really important to discuss any new technology. I think we should be very cautious with it, because innovation without imagination is a very, very dangerous thing.”

“When you prize the authentic, then we start to make a parallel lane where AI can exist [in the industry] — and there are many positive things we can get from it — but it is not authentically human. It is inauthentic in that way,” she added.

Blanchett’s sentiment is shared by many in the industry who see the tech as a part of the future but also as something that will never be able to replace humans because of the experiences it will never understand. For example, Justin Theroux believes Tim Burton’s recent movie BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is a perfect case study for how AI is behind humanity.

“When people see this film, they’ll understand I don’t think there’ll ever be a Tim Burton movie that could have been made by AI,” Thoreux told Fox News. “He is so singular in his vision.”

“I think there will be AI films in the future,” he continued. “Perhaps films written, to some extent, by AI, but I think for the moment, when you have a real sort of…just putting it against a Tim Burton movie, I think it’s very difficult to duplicate what comes out of that man’s head.”

Movieguide® previously reported on AI in Hollywood:

As AI’s capability to create evermore realistic products grows, Georgia lawmakers and Atlanta-based moviemakers discussed how they hope the technology will be implemented in the future.

Frank Patterson, the CEO of Trilith Studios in Atlanta, told lawmakers in a state hearing that he hopes the technology will be allowed to revamp old movies to make them more palatable for modern audiences.

“My son, when he was younger, didn’t want to watch a movie that was in black and white, and didn’t like the old language and the old tone,” Patterson said. “We can fix all that now with these AI tools. Which for the studios that have libraries of content — I didn’t want WILLY WONKA to be remade, the 1960s version. But they remade it. We should have just used the AI technologies to contemporize the story, right?”