Justine Bateman Criticizes The Overwhelming Use Of AI In Hollywood: “A Conveyor Belt Of Content”

Veteran actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman has never been shy about voicing her views and concerns about Hollywood’s future with AI. From being a lead voice on the issue during the SAG-AFTRA strikes to becoming a public figure in the AI-skeptic movement, Bateman is continuing the criticism with her latest activist movement.

Two years ago, Bateman founded Credo 23, an organization “that believes generative AI will destroy the structure of the film business,” whose goal is to make “very human, very raw, very real films/series” while respecting the task of filmmaking. To make other big-name industries prioritize this goal as much as Bateman does, she argues for a movement titled “the new,” which is described as a “push to restore a humanity to filmmaking” and used to “combat a drift to the synthetic using organic material and human both in creation and sensibility.”

To launch this movement, Bateman has created the Credo 23 Film Festival, a self-described “filmmaker-first, no AI event where film cannot have anything machine-generated in the features. The festival is taking place this weekend at Hollywood American Legion Post 43, where approximately thirty short films and longer-length features will be shown. Among them, Bateman is premiering two of her own creations, Look and Feel, with David Duchovny and Rae Dawn Chong starring in the latter.

Bateman spoke more about her views on AI and how it has morphed Hollywood before the festival with The Hollywood Reporter, stating that Hollywood “changed long before AI—when the tech companies came in and carpetbagged Hollywood. They’ve never been in the entertainment business. They’re in the tech business… It became about subscribers and a totally different setup.” Bateman claims that this drive of quantity over quality is making a “conveyor belt of content,” which she defines as a film or TV show that a person can put on as “background” while they do other tasks. The issue with this is that AI can easily “automate” this mindless content; it’s what Bateman calls “the next step” to “subsume the entertainment business because it helps the conveyor belt.”

When asked about the idea of AI being a tool to help filmmakers, Bateman states that she doesn’t believe it because if that were true, “hundreds of films would have been impossible to get made before now. Humans always figured it out… Constraints are what make great art.” Bateman furthers her argument by stating that she believes no art can come from AI because she defines artists as “tubes through which the universe comes through us. Throughout history, new genres of stories or new music come through that tube, and it changes society. But that doesn’t come through with AI…the people using it are not artists.”

While Bateman paints a bleak picture of the future of Hollywood if it continues down this route with AI, she does believe that people will “start getting sick of these regurgitations.” Even though it might be a while until then, Bateman claims, people “will want something real and raw and human and not AI.”