We all know what AI mogul Ben Affleck means when he talks about "cutting costs"

Specifically, we can now all read a patent application that Affleck filed back in 2024, in which he identified which “costs”—i.e., jobs—his technology could help its clients most successfully eliminate, including offering a 50 percent reduction in a production’s visual effects budget, and similarly large savings on things like set dressing and background actors or extras. Big chunks of the patent fall into technical details mostly concerned with how you teach Affleck’s AI to “compose” shots, which we’ll leave to the more technically minded out there to parse. But we are fascinated by a portion that discusses recruiting “ambassadors” to help normalize AI usage by directors, while emphasizing that the aim is to “enhance the creative process without supplanting the creative vision and direction of human filmmakers.”

All of this is worth tracking in part because Affleck’s communications about his company have, in recent months, moved aggressively away from talking about “cost” concerns, presumably because the marks have started cracking that particular code. These days, his language puts a lot of emphasis on “creators,” a designation that appears, as far as we can tell, to refer only to jobs that Ben Affleck himself has held in Hollywood, like writing, directing, and acting. (Non-background variety.) “We need to preserve what makes storytelling human, which is judgment,” he said in a statement when Netflix paid him what could add up to as much as $600 million for his AI company, a statement that makes absolutely zero sense when you think about all of the thousands of moments of individual human judgment that will be lost as AI use eliminates skilled below-the-line jobs. (But which tracks much better if you have it in your head that films just sort of magically flow down from a singular vision pouring out of a singular dude, who looks and sounds a lot like a singular Ben Affleck.) It’s worth noting that Affleck has said this part a bit louder in the past, back before his ties to AI tech were quite as well known: During a CNBC appearance about AI back in 2024, he stated that “I wouldn’t like to be in the visual effects business. They’re in trouble because what used to cost a lot of money is going to cost a lot less. And it’s going to hammer that space, and it already is. And maybe it shouldn’t take a thousand people to render something.”