Emma Thompson has spoken of her frustration over the increasing proliferation of AI prompts when writing.
Speaking to Stephen Colbert on his late night talkshow, Thompson, who won an Oscar for her 1996 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, spoke of her “intense irritation” with AI.
Clenching her fists, Thompson told Colbert that she usually writes scripts longhand due to a belief in a “connection between the brain and the hands”, before transferring to the script to Microsoft’s word-processing app.
“Recently, the Word document is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’” said Thompson said, in reference to Word’s AI system Copilot.
“And so I end up just going, ‘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 went on to say that her run-ins with technology are not new, and that when she was finishing the Sense and Sensibility script, “I came back from the loo to find that it had changed the entire script into hieroglyphs … completely gone.”
She then went in her dressing gown to Stephen Fry’s house, where he spent eight hours recovering the script, “and it came out in one long sentence”.
Thompson then “had to re-do it. The computer had taken it and hidden it … like it had done it on purpose.”
Speaking in 2023 at a conference in Cambridge, Thompson railed against the new labelling of creative storytelling as “content” and said that focusing on raw honesty while writing was key to a script’s efficacy.
“What is authentic, whether you like it or not,” she said, “is going to be meaningful to somebody. You find your audience by being completely authentic.”
Trying to produce a script according to a formula, she said, led to films that elicited unhappy results. “You sit there and you watch them and you wonder why, at the end of it, you feel a bit ill.”
Thompson is promoting new TV detective series Down Cemetery Road, and won rave reviews for her performance as a widow who tries to thwart kidnappers in the recent film The Dead of Winter.
Hollywood is fighting back against the rise of AI in both unauthorised use of images and in the scripting and production of movies. Over the weekend, the director Guillermo Del Toro said he would “rather die” than use generative AI while making films.
“I’m 61,” he said, “and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak … The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I’d rather die.’”
