Dougray’s AI movie warning

Actor Dougray Scott has warned that artificial intelligence could make writers’ and actors’ roles obsolete and turn movies into “cartoons” if the industry isn’t careful.

Scott, 58, is one of Scotland’s best known film and TV stars after roles in blockbusters like Ever After and Mission: Impossible II and his International Emmy Award winning performance in Edinburgh-based drama series Irvine Welsh’s Crime.

The Fife-born actor, currently starring in the second season of BBC miniseries Vigil, said that AI could eventually produce scripts that were cheaper than human scriptwriters’ but would be “uncontroversial” and “middle of the road”.

And he warned that the development of computer generated imagery (CGI) could make it unnecessary to use real actors.

He told BBS Scotland’s The Edit: “I think we have to be very very careful. There’s a scenario where AI could quite easily write all the scripts for all the films that you’d see.

“They’d be acceptable, and they’d just vanilla-ise everything. It makes everything just bleugh.

“If you give an audience enough standardised, really uncontroversial, really middle of the road drama, then after a while that’s what they’ll come to expect.”

Scott added: “Therefore, it could in the future be acceptable for television networks to use AI in order to write scripts because it’s a lot cheaper, and then eventually we’ll turn to actors.

“They’ll be like ‘well, we have the images of him, him, her, her, her, we don’t really need them because the CGI capabilities is so great now that we can recreate him, her, on screen without actually using them’, and really it’s like a cartoon that actually looks like real people.

“That’s the future if we don’t really keep an eye on it.”