Most people will recognize the picture above as Ashton Kutcher, an actor most famous for dating a child, marrying his mother, marrying the child once she was of age, and defending a convicted rapist as being a really good person. This statement from him, you’ll also recognize as the usual AI bullshit.

My initial reaction to this was a version of the title of this post: Another stupid person said something stupid about stupid AI. But the truth is, his timing may not be accurate, but his point is valid. If you had told 1990s Hollywood stuntmen that computer graphics would be replacing them in thirty years, they would have scoffed — and rightly so. At the time, CG was far too expensive and low quality to be a threat.

We also have reason to doubt AI because this propaganda is arriving because a lot of people have invested an embarrassingly large amount of their greedy ill-gotten gains into AI and they’re desperate for it to show some kind of return. But that’s really just the reason they’re pushing AI as a solution prematurely. Yes, it’s not ready now. But it will be ready in the near future.

And I don’t think it will be an entirely bad thing.

As someone who has wanted to make a short film for the last fifteen years but doesn’t have access to the human resources required. How many people know the camera operator, sound person, lighting technicians, and actors required to make even a five minute film? Not to mention the sets, costumes, props, and special effects.

Being able to write a script and run it through an AI production process is an extremely attractive idea. Not for the final product, which I know would be substandard to the real thing, but to use as a calling card to get professionals involved in creating the real thing.

What’s scary about Kutcher’s comment is how easy it is to skim over his most important point: We have to raise the bar.

Because the corpse grinding capitalists that own Hollywood are only going to read the first part and what they’ll take away from it is this: Hey, guys, we don’t need writers, actors, directors or any of those other pain in the ass ‘creatives’. We can just tell AI the movie we want and make a billion dollars!

If you’ve ever watched a movie from The Asylum studios, you know the exact level of quality we’re going to get when producers got full AI: