Emma Thompson is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, thank you very much, so she certainly does not need the help of some robot to produce work. During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Thompson described artificial intelligence as an “Intense irritation. I cannot begin to tell you.” In fact, Thompson prefers to forgo digital altogether for her first draft, instead writing out her projects by hand, because “I believe that there’s a connection between the brain and the hand,” she explained.
But we ultimately live in a digital world, requiring Dame Thompson to brush up against this vulgar technology. “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?'” With extreme prejudice, Thompson admitted that when she sees those prompts she ends up raging, “‘I don’t need you to fucking rewrite what I’ve just written. Will you fuck off? Just fuck off.’ I’m so annoyed.”
Thompson, of course, is far from the only star to take issue with AI in Hollywood. Last month, Werner Herzog said he’d seen AI movies that “look completely dead,” while Guillermo del Toro recently said he’d rather die than use it. But AI is just one factor in an ongoing crisis of devaluing and depersonalizing art in the industry. For example, “To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” Thompson lamented in 2023. “‘Content,’ what do you mean ‘content’? It’s just rude, actually. It’s just a rude word for creative people. … That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something. It’s, I think, a very misleading word. And I think it’s one of the things that maybe the language around the way in which we speak to one another, and the way in which the executives speak to creatives, the way in which we have to understand one another and combine better.” For any execs listening, add AI to the list of things you shouldn’t say to Emma Thompson.
