Ben Affleck says he used AI tools developed by his company, InterPositive, on his upcoming Netflix film 'Animals'. The actor and director told the story this week of how his first serious look at the technology sent him into a panic — and why he decided to build his own version instead of waiting for the industry to be reshaped around him.
Netflix bought InterPositive in July for $587 million. 'Animals' is scheduled to arrive on the platform on October 9.
'We have to do as many movies in the next few years'
Affleck has described his first close encounter with advanced AI as a heart attack. He called his friend and collaborator Matt Damon right after, telling him they needed to make as many movies as possible in the next few years because, in his words, they were finished. The line has been circulating since, but the practical response behind it is what got Netflix's attention.
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Rather than fight the shift, Affleck built a company. InterPositive spent eight months shooting footage specifically to train AI tools for film crews. That dataset is proprietary — Affleck said he was uncomfortable with the idea of models being trained on his peers' work, so he created his own source material instead.
What the tools are actually for
According to Affleck, the tools are designed to support people working in film, not replace them. He used them on 'Animals' mostly during post-production, though he declined to say exactly how. That refusal is itself notable. Post-production is where AI can quietly save time and money on editing, color, sound cleanup, and visual effects — and where the line between assisting a crew and replacing part of it gets blurry fast.
The eight-month shoot to build training data suggests this wasn't a side project. It was an infrastructure play, and Netflix bought it.
Hollywood is still split
The industry remains divided on AI, and the names on each side matter. James Cameron and Martin Scorsese have backed its use. Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan have questioned what it does to the craft. Affleck now sits firmly in the first camp, but with a caveat — he's trying to set the terms of how the data gets sourced, not just whether the tools get used.
That distinction is the one worth watching. If a $587 million acquisition normalizes ethical, proprietary AI training in premium film production, it creates pressure on other studios to answer the same questions: where does the training data come from, and who owns it?
The crypto angle nobody is pricing
Affleck's insistence on owning and controlling his own training set mirrors a fight the crypto industry has been having for years over data provenance and user ownership. Blockchain-based content authentication and rights management tools have struggled to find mainstream use cases. A Hollywood standard for ethical AI training data could change that — and it would need exactly the kind of tamper-resistant provenance records that blockchains are good at.
None of that is guaranteed. AI tokens have moved on sentiment before and faded just as quickly, especially with Bitcoin dominance this high. But if studios start writing data-sourcing rules into production contracts, the infrastructure question gets real.
The first test is October 9, when 'Animals' lands on Netflix and audiences — and the rest of the industry — get to see what Affleck's tools actually did.
