Ben Affleck slams AI lighting as ‘half-baked’, ‘crap’ and ‘unreliable’

American actor Ben Affleck appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Friday and offered the most economically honest critique of AI hype yet.

“When you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write something, it’s really bad,” he said. “This is crap because by its very nature it’s middling or average and unreliable.”

And he went on to add that the real problem isn’t the technology, but the stories being sold around it. “A lot of that rhetoric comes from people trying to justify their valuations by saying, ‘In two years, we’re going to change everything. There’s going to be no more jobs,'” Affleck explained.

“The reason they’re saying that is because they need to do an investment evaluation that can justify the capital investment that they’re going to make in these data centers.”

He backed it up with numbers. ChatGPT 5 is only 25% better than ChatGPT 4, but costs four times more in power and data. “In the early days of AI, this line jumped really high, and now it’s kind of leveling off,” he said, pointing to a period of stagnation that contradicts growth projections that would drive trillions of dollars in valuations.

Affleck also revealed what most people actually use AI for. “The vast majority of people using AI are using it as a companion bot to chat with at night. There’s no work, there’s no productivity, there’s no value.”

He was candid about claims that AI will replace filmmakers. “Actually, I think it’s very unlikely that we’d make a movie like Tilly Norwood, bullshit, all over the place. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Instead, he sees AI as a production tool. Filmmakers can shoot scenes locally and use AI to recreate expensive locations, saving money while focusing on performance. “You don’t have to go to the North Pole. You can just shoot the scene here with your hoodie on and make it look very realistic, like you’re in the North Pole.”

On Sunday, Michael Burry, who predicted the 2008 financial collapse, backed Affleck’s analysis of X, calling him “on point” and “obviously a smart guy”. Burry is shorting NVIDIA, warning that spending on AI infrastructure won’t yield promised returns.

Affleck’s conclusion was simple. “I think it turns out that technology isn’t actually advancing in exactly the same way that they presented it. And it’s really going to be a similar tool to visual effects.”

The technology stagnation he described is consistent with what industry insiders have been saying behind closed doors. In other words, OpenAI’s massive spending is not leading to proportionate improvements, and the economic model may not work.

Report finds that nearly 40% of AI output is lost due to rework or misalignment

This means that even as more workers use AI, its output still requires significant review and editing, rather than being taken at face value.