BAFTA rises as Tom Cruise argues against AI in movies

On stage at a recent BAFTA event in London, Tom Cruise spent roughly six minutes making the case for keeping moviemaking rooted in people, not software. He stressed he isn’t calling for an all-out ban on AI, but he drew a hard line at using it to replace human craft — a stance that drew applause in the room.

“There is nothing like human,” Cruise said. “People want human experience,” according to Deadline.

He pointed to this summer’s crowd-pleasing blockbusters as evidence that audiences respond to work built by filmmakers and performers, not machine learning, per Deadline’s account of the speech.

Backing it up offscreen

Behind the scenes, Cruise pressed the issue during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA labor talks. He personally joined a Zoom session with negotiators and lobbied the studios’ bargaining group, the AMPTP, to protect stunt performers and coordinators from being automated or digitally duplicated out of jobs. It’s a cause that dovetails with his reputation for doing many of his own stunts rather than handing them off to doubles.

He’s been wary on-screen, too

Themes he raised in London have been threaded through his films for years:

• Mission: Impossible (most recent installment) — pits Ethan Hunt against a rogue, omnipresent AI that can outthink humans.
• Minority Report (2002) — explores the dangers of predictive algorithms and surveillance long before today’s AI boom.

Cruise’s remarks arrive as Hollywood continues to define how — and how far — AI fits into the business after the 2023 strikes placed the issue in the spotlight.