Emma Thompson talks about being ‘deeply disturbed’ by artificial intelligence | Emma Thompson

Emma Thompson has spoken of her frustration with the increasing prevalence of AI prompts when writing.

Speaking with Stephen Colbert on his late-night talk show, Thompson, who won an Oscar for her 1996 film adaptation of the novel Sense and Sensibility, spoke of her “deep discomfort” with artificial intelligence.

Clenching her fists, Thompson told Colbert that she usually writes texts in longhand because of her belief in the “brain-hand connection,” before switching to text into Microsoft’s word processing application.

“Lately, a Word doc was constantly saying, ‘Do you want me to rewrite that for you?’” Thompson said, referring to Word’s Copilot AI system.

So I ended up saying, “I don’t need to rewrite what I just wrote!” Are you leaving? Just stay away! “I am very upset.”

Thompson went on to say that her encounters with technology were not new, and that when she was finishing the text for Sense and Sensibility, she “came back from the bathroom to find that he had changed the entire text to hieroglyphs…it was completely gone.”

She then went in her dress to Stephen Fry’s house, where he spent eight hours retrieving the script, “and it came out in one long sentence.”

Then Thompson “had to re-do it. The computer took it and hid it… as if he had done it on purpose.”

Speaking in 2023 at a conference in Cambridge, Thompson criticized the new classification of creative storytelling as “content”, and said that the emphasis on raw honesty while writing was key to the effectiveness of the text.

“What’s authentic, whether you like it or not, is going to be meaningful to someone. You can find your audience by being completely authentic,” she said.

She said that trying to produce a script according to a specific formula led to films with unhappy results. “You sit there and watch them and wonder why, by the end, you feel a little sick.”

Thompson is promoting a new TV series called Down Cemetery Road, and has earned rave reviews for her performance as a widow trying to thwart kidnappers in the recent film The Dead of Winter.

Hollywood is resisting the rise of artificial intelligence in the unauthorized use of images, script writing and film production. Over the weekend, director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use generative AI during filmmaking.

He said: “I am 61 years old, and I hope that I will remain completely uninterested in using it until I get upset… A few days ago, someone wrote me an email, saying: ‘What is your position on artificial intelligence?’ And my answer was very brief. I said: ‘I would rather die.’”