Dame Emma Thompson slams use of AI
Dame Emma Thompson has admitted she feels “intense irritation” with the use of AI in Hollywood.
Dame Emma Thompson feels “intense irritation” with the use of AI in Hollywood.
The 66-year-old actress-and-writer still pens scripts by hand before transferring her notes to her computer and she has grown increasingly infuriated when her document processing programme asks her if she wants help with tweaking her screenplays.
Appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she fumed about the use of AI: “Intense irritation. I cannot begin to tell you.
“Because I write long hand on a pad, old script actually, because I believe that there is a connection between the brain and the hand.
“So it’s very important to me. And then when I’ve written something, I will put it into a Word document.
"And recently, the Word document is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’ And so I end up just going, ’I don’t need you to rewrite what I’ve just written, will you f*** off?! Just f*** off!' I’m so annoyed."
The host suggested Emma show her computer the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar she won in 1995 for Sense and Sensibility.
She replied: “I don’t think that it would care."
Even before the rise of AI, the Nanny McPhee star has experienced problems with technology when working.
She recalled: “When I was finishing Sense and Sensibility on the computer, I came back from the bathroom to find that it had changed the entire script into hieroglyphs.
“The script, completely gone. I panicked. I went to Stephen Fry’s house because I didn’t have another copy, and Steven spent 8 hours and it came out in one long sentence. I had to re-do it. The computer had taken it and hidden it… like it had done it on purpose.”
Emma - who also won a Best Actress Oscar for Howards End in 1992 - recently admitted she never "intended" to become an actress.
The Dead of Winter star, whose parents Eric Thompson and Phyllida Law are both actors, told Britain's HELLO! magazine: "I didn't grow up wanting to be an actor at all. It always seemed like a rather precarious job to me – and it is! I remember wanting to be a hospital administrator at one point.
"But then, somehow, I became a comedian. Acting came to me from that, rather by accident. I never intended to be doing this for a living, but it's worked out rather well."
