Emma Thompson Tells AI to ‘Just F— Off!’ and Calls It an ‘Intense Irritation’ as a Screenwriter: ‘Will You Just F— Off? I’m So Annoyed’
Emma Thompson lost it on “The Late Show” when host Stephen Colbert asked about her feelings regarding “the coming AI revolution” in Hollywood. As an Oscar and BAFTA-winning screenwriter thanks to her 1995 adaptation of “Sense & Sensibility,” Thompson is especially irate when it comes to AI chatbots asking to rewrite her work.
“Intense irritation. I cannot begin to tell you,” Thompson said about her feelings on AI. “Because I write long hand on a pad, old script actually, because I believe that there is a connection between the brain and the hand. So it’s very important to me. And then 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?’ And so I end up just saying, ’I don’t need you to rewrite what I’ve just written, will you fuck off?! Just fuck off!” I’m so annoyed.
When Colbert told Thompson to just show her computer her Oscar statue for adapted screenplay, Thompson said: “I don’t think it would care.” She then said technology has long complicated her screenwriting process.
“When I was finishing ‘Sense & Sensibility’ on the computer, I came back from the bathroom to find that it had changed the entire script into hieroglyphs,” Thompson remembered. “The script, completely gone. I panicked. I went to Stephen Fry’s house because I didn’t have another copy, and Steven spent 8 hours and it came out in one long sentence. I had to re-do it. The computer had taken it and hidden it… like it had done it on purpose.”
Thompson is the latest Oscar winner to speak out against AI in Hollywood. Guillermo del Toro, whose latest movie “Frankenstein” arrives Nov. 7 on Netflix, recently told NPR that he would rather die than have to use AI in his filmmaking process.
“AI, particularly generative AI — I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested,” del Toro said. “I’m 61, 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.’”
Watch Thompson’s full interview on “The Late Show” in the video below.
