Hollywood's AI Use Is Widespread but Deeply Divisive

Puck media analyst Matthew Belloni says AI tools have already woven themselves into everyday film production, even as much of the industry publicly rejects them and a handful of insiders quietly profit from the shift.

According to Puck's Matthew Belloni, the real story of AI in Hollywood isn't whether studios and filmmakers are using the technology — they already are, often without much fanfare. The more pressing fight, he argues, is over who ends up controlling how these tools reshape filmmaking going forward. That tension plays out unevenly across the industry. Plenty of screenwriters, directors, and actors have publicly rejected AI outright, refusing to use it themselves or work alongside collaborators who do, treating it as a threat to craft and livelihood. Others take a far more pragmatic view, seeing AI as a potential creative collaborator or a way to cut production costs in an industry under constant financial pressure. Then there's a smaller group actively cashing in. Ben Affleck is named as one of the few high-profile figures already generating significant money by betting that AI can genuinely streamline and improve how films get made, rather than just cheapen them. Belloni's comments come from WIRED's Big Interview podcast, where he unpacks how quietly this shift has happened compared to the loud public debate surrounding it. The gap between Hollywood's private adoption of AI and its public posture toward the technology suggests the industry's reckoning with these tools is far from settled — it's just being negotiated out of view.