Chris Pratt told Variety Tuesday night at the New York premiere of “Mercy” that he doesn’t “feel like someone’s gonna replace me” with AI. He added that the panic surrounding synthetic AI performers like Tilly Norwood is “all bullshit.”
“I don’t feel like someone’s gonna replace me that’s AI,” Pratt said. “I heard this Tilly Norwood thing, I think that’s all bullshit. I’ve never seen her in a movie. I don’t know who this bitch is. It’s all fake until it’s something.”
Pratt went on to say there are wider applications of AI that don’t threaten human jobs, and that the emerging tech can be “an amazing tool in the right hands.” Although he thinks it will “inevitably disrupt the industry,” he had no doubts that “great filmmakers” will continue to make “great films.”
He added, “I don’t think you’re going to replace the human soul of a director or a writer or an actor or a singer or any of this stuff that requires human yearning and suffering and vision in art.”
Tilly Norwood is a synthetic AI performer created by Dutch comedian Eline Van der Velden. After Van der Velden unveiled her creation at the Zurich Film Festival last summer, claiming Tilly would soon sign for representation, there was immediate backlash from the entertainment industry at large. SAG-AFTRA said Tilly and other AI performers like it create “the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”
In response, Van der Velden defended Tilly as “not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art.”
Pratt is hardly the first Hollywood mainstay to give his thoughts on AI in film. In December, Leonardo DiCaprio said AI lacks humanity and therefore could never be “authentically” considered art.
“It could be an enhancement tool for a young filmmaker to do something we’ve never seen before,” DiCaprio said. “I think anything that is going to be authentically thought of as art has to come from the human being.”
