Ben Affleck writes Python. Shitty Python, by his own account, but still. Surprise.
This week the internet found out the guy from Good Will Hunting is a full-on AI nerd. In GQ’s One More Question with Zach Baron (Oct 6), Affleck walked through tensors, convolutional neural networks, edge detection and inference like he was explaining it to his kids at dinner. TechCrunch rounded up the clips going viral (Oct 8), including one from Bloomberg’s Screentime conference where he talks about taking open models, unfreezing the weights, and teaching them cinematic standards for a specific movie.
He’s no tourist. He started InterPositive in 2022, a small company that built AI tools for filmmakers, and Netflix bought it in March. The reported price was $587 million. He says that number’s “not right,” and that he didn’t own the whole thing anyway. The tools don’t make movies. They help with the grunt work in post: relighting, swapping backgrounds, fixing a missing shot, used on his own film Animals.
Here’s the part that stuck with me. He admits that when he first saw what these video models could do, he called Matt Damon and said, “Dude, we’re fucked.” Been there. Then he sat down with the engineers, looked at the data, and figured out it wasn’t the end of anything. His line: “you’re never just going to type your movie out. That’s never going to happen.”
And in another clip, his actual worry. Not Skynet. “I worry about learned helplessness. I worry about responsible use.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
A movie star who learned enough about the machine to bend it to his own work isn’t the problem. He’s the model. He used the tool hard, and the movie is still his, because the judgment is his. Learned helplessness is the other guy. The one who types a two-minute thought into a box, takes whatever falls out, slaps his name on it, and goes looking for a buyer. That’s not a filmmaker or a writer. That’s a vending machine with a byline.
I love these tools. I’m old, and they make me ridiculously more productive. Who cares how exactly a thing came to be? That’s what we made tools for. I avoided AI like the plague writing Goad. Even as I began experimenting with the tools to see of an old dude could understand enough to use any of it. Couch Survivor, one of my YouTube chanells, pounded hard on AI and turned me into a believer. I could have a funny thought (at least to me), come up with an idea, and create it in a day, without relying on anybody else to help. It set me free. But I didn’t just type in a prompt and kick back. I did all the same steps as before, just with workers in the form of AI that carried out instructions until I got what I wanted. I know you can just dump your idea into a prompt and be done with it, but to me that destroys idea. If you’re not calling the shots all the way then you lose something. The project soul. That’s just me. Everybody makes their own judgement and draws their own lines. And that’s the key. Judgement. Ownership. Responsibility. You don’t have that, how do you have any pride in what you did? What did you accomplish? Honesty is the platform I choose to stand on.
Which brings me to the little world.
Circle is being built at GAPOZ Press, the people’s publisher, and it’s built for the opposite of learned helplessness. Members request assignments. Reviews are structured and prompted, submitted right on the site, and they guide you through the work from different angles. They encourage real thought and feelings, not polite nothing. This is feedback writers can use to learn and improve their skills. Their craft.
And AI? That’s your call. We only ask one thing: be honest about it. Before your first submission you take a one-time pledge. To be honest about your work. No forms on every piece you submit, no repeating some pledge. Just your word from the start, to be honest. If somebody thinks there’s a problem, the Hall of Justice sorts it out case by case.
Your name. Your word. Your work. Your reputation. They are all part of the circle.
The doors are open now at gapoz.com. Membership is limited, there’s no fee, and registration is open but subject to approval. Come meet people, make some friends, and grow your craft together.
You can’t just type your movie. Come write it with us.
Also on the beat
- Ghostwriters haunted by AI as commissions fall: ghostwriters tell The Bookseller that clients are trying AI first, and more of them are now being hired to fix AI-made manuscripts (Oct 9).
- Japanese wholesaler confirms it sold books to Anthropic: Nippan’s overseas unit sold books to Anthropic from Dec 2024 to Dec 2025, and Japanese publishers are angry (Nikkei Asia, Oct 7–8).
- Kevin Roose’s new book gets an AI knockoff on Amazon: one day after The AGI Chronicles came out, a lookalike by “K. Rose” was showing up right under it in search (Oct 8).
- Novvel.co pitches AI storyboards for graphic novels: at Frankfurt, a Singapore startup says AI gets a graphic adaptation 60–70% of the way, then the author, editor and illustrator finish it (PW, Oct 8).
- Storytel on AI-translated audiobooks: the streamer says AI translation gets an eight-book series out in six months (PW, Oct 8).
