Simon Pegg says AI will push humans to “up our game”

Simon Pegg has discussed the increasing prevalence of AI in the film industry, suggesting that it could have upsides.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Pegg said he believes that AI “might be a good thing in that it will stop us from being mediocre.”

He added: “There is a lot of mediocrity out there sometimes. Things that pass for entertainment are not quite as good as they should be.

“So if it ups our game because we want to escape the velocity of this creeping threat, then it’s a good thing.”

However, Pegg said he believes that something AI can’t replicate is the human process of working through drafts and slowly bringing together an idea and script for a film.

“I think the writing process, it is a process, and when you write a first draft you write something that you know is going to improve and you will improve,” he said.

“If we get AI to write those first drafts the whole time people are only ever going to be doctoring scripts or giving notes,” Pegg added.

“There’s going to be no sort of genesis in them, no kind of heart. I read a funny thing that says AI hasn’t had any childhood trauma so it’s never going to make good art. But it’s true.”

Elsewhere, Pegg revealed that he kept his alcoholism secret on the set of the original Mission: Impossible. Speaking on BBC4’s Desert Island Discs recently, Pegg says that he hid his reliance on alcohol while on film sets in the early 2000s.

“You become very sneaky when you have something like that in your life,” he told the show’s host, Lauren Laverne.

He continued: “You learn how to do it without anyone noticing because it takes over. It wants to sustain itself and it will do everything it can to not be stopped…But eventually it just gets to a point when it can’t be hidden, and that’s when, thankfully, I was able to pull out of the dive.”

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