Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank star and billionaire, is starring in the upcoming film Marty Supreme. He has a fairly substantial role in the sports biopic which is only loosely based on ping pong star Marty Reisman. O’Leary is the fourth actor listed on the Letterboxd page for the film behind Timothee Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Odessa A’zion. And yet, after working with so many talented artists across the board, O’Leary just came out with an utterly tone-deaf take about the film’s production and AI.
Kevin O’Leary Shares Bad Pro-AI Take After Marty Supreme
Marty Supreme centers on a person, Marty Mauser, played by Timothee Chalamet, who is bent on becoming the best ping pong player there ever was. Given that premise, there are a lot of competition scenes in the movie with tons of onlookers in the crowd. As is standard practice since none of those characters are impactful to the story, the crowds were made up of film extras.
Kevin O’Leary can’t understand why that is. It is beyond him that Josh Safdie, the director, did not just use AI to generate the fans and save money. Per Variety, his tone-deaf take was, “Almost every scene had as many as 150 extras. Now, those people have to stay awake for 18 hours, be completely dressed in the background.”
“[They’re] not necessarily in the movie, but they’re necessary to be there moving around. And yet, it costs millions of dollars to do that. Why couldn’t you simply put AI agents in their place? Because they’re not the main actors. They’re only in the story visually,” he said. “[You could] save millions of dollars, so more movies could be made. The same director, instead of spending $90 million or whatever he spent, could’ve spent $35 million and made two movies.”
What O’Leary is missing here is that movies like this aren’t made to generate as much money as they can. Yes, making money is how more movies continue to get made, but Marty Supreme is much more art than commodity. O’Leary, who has made a living trying to extract as much profit from every single thing that he can, can’t see beyond his own capitalistic senses and understand why it’s so valuable to put real people into a movie and not AI replacements.
For one thing, those people get valuable experience and help liven up the sets. It also makes the scene more realistic, because those cheers and jeers from crowdmembers are real. Chalamet and his co-stars must deal with legitimate people behind them, not a green screen with countless people who aren’t even there. Plus, it’s always a good idea to pay a person to do something rather than computer generate it to save a few dollars.
Kevin O’Leary’s Bad Takes Don’t Stop There
It is actually impressive that Kevin O’Leary could work on a movie alongside such talented, passionate, and purposeful artists and still come away thinking that movies need more AI. Beyond replacing extras with AI, the Shark Tank host also spoke up on Tilly Norwood, the AI “actress” that’s making waves and forcefully pushing the movie-making scene rapidly into dystopia.
Though he got the generated “actress” name wrong, O’Leary said, “She’s 100% AI. She doesn’t exist. But she’s a great actress. She can come in any age you want. She doesn’t need to eat, so she works 24 hours a day. The union is going out of their mind.” It didn’t stop there, either. He praised an entirely AI band and said this is the future and that it’s time to get on board. Sadly, even spending time making art and working with artists couldn’t convince O’Leary that they deserve to be employed rather than a computer.
Conclusion
It goes without saying that I firmly believe that AI is awful. It’s anti-art, anti-humanity, anti-earth, and a major risk to our jobs and this entire industry. Generative AI takes the role of a person, putting them out of a job and reducing the quality of art or anything of the sort by a wide margin. It’s referred to as “AI slop” for a reason. It is extremely sad, then, that Kevin O’Leary can do an entire movie and still come out with a horrible take like this.
