American actor, Ben Affleck walked onto The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Friday and delivered the most economically honest takedown of AI hype yet.
“If you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it’s really shitty,” he said. “It’s shitty because by its nature it goes to the mid, to the average, and it’s not reliable.”
Then he went further, adding that real problem isn’t the technology, it’s the story being sold around it. “A lot of that rhetoric comes from people trying to justify valuations around companies where they go, ‘We’re going to change everything in two years. There’s going to be no more work,’” Affleck explained.
“The reason they’re saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the CapEx spend they’re going to make on these data centres.”
He backed it up with numbers. ChatGPT 5 is only 25% better than ChatGPT 4 but costs four times as much in electricity and data. “The early AI, the line went up very steeply and it’s now sort of levelling off,” he said, pointing to what he sees as a plateau contradicting the growth projections driving trillion-dollar valuations.
Affleck also revealed what most people actually use AI for. “The vast majority of people who use AI are using it as companion bots to chat with at night and stuff. There’s no work, there’s no productivity, there’s no value to it.”
On claims that AI will replace filmmakers, he was blunt. “I actually don’t think it’s very likely that it’s going to be making movies from whole cloth like Tilly Norwood, like that’s bulls— I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Instead, he sees AI as a production tool. Filmmakers can shoot scenes locally and use AI to recreate expensive locations, saving money while focusing on performances. “We don’t have to go to the North Pole. We can shoot the scene here in our parkas, and then make it appear very realistically as if we’re in the North Pole.”
Ben Affleck is clearly a smart guy. So this does not surprise me. It sounds familiar and on point.
— Cassandra Unchained (@michaeljburry) January 18, 2026
Delivered much better than I ever could. https://t.co/X1VvE9yX2N
On Sunday, Michael Burry—who predicted the 2008 collapse—endorsed Affleck’s analysis on X, calling him “clearly a smart guy” whose arguments were “on point.” Burry has been shorting NVIDIA and warning AI infrastructure spending won’t generate promised returns.
Affleck’s conclusion was simple. “I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. And really what it is going to be is a tool just like visual effects.”
The technology plateau he described lines up with what industry insiders have been quietly saying: OpenAI’s massive spending isn’t translating to proportional improvements, and the economic model might not work.
David Adubiina
