‘Shazam!’ star Zachary Levi compares AI to biblical disaster

“Shazam!” star Zachary Levi feels a biblical disaster looming, thanks to artificial intelligence.

On the “The George Janko Show” podcast, Levi compared AI to the great flood from the book of Genesis, saying, “I don’t think the flood is water. Honestly, I think the flood is AI.”

He continued, “We can talk all day long and wax philosophical about how do we save the industry from itself in the way that it treats people, or it doesn’t make great content or whatever. Guys, honestly like, t-minus two years from now, good luck finding any job, because the studios will have a technology … it’s already basically here.” 

Levi went on to give an example of audiences being able to generate their own movies thanks to AI technology.

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“Imagine if you will, not only will every studio have possessed this technology, but then they’ll go to you and say, ‘Hey as a part of your HBO Max subscription you can pay ten extra dollars, and you get to use the creator sandbox, and in there, you can make your own movies. And you can type in anything that’s a Warner Brothers asset, so it can be Shazam and Batman and Neo from ‘The Matrix,’ and you can type in all these characters, and you want them to go on a treasure hunt on Mars and I want it to feel like a Stephen Spielberg movie, go.’ And then it will make that movie, and it will look indiscernible from human-made, in fact it will look amazing. And it will be entirely animated, but it will look like real life. This is where we’re about to be.”

The “Tangled” star mentioned that he is working on his own studio to stay ahead of the curve, saying, “Right now, the studio I’m trying to build feels very much like the ark that God was telling Noah, ‘You gotta go build this thing, because the flood is coming.’”

When asked by host George Janko why he wanted to continue working in entertainment if AI poses such a threat, Levi focused on the power of the human element.

“There should always be, hopefully will always be, a niche, at least a niche part of the entertainment industry where people are like, ‘I still want to go support humans making art. Human-made art.’” 

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He admitted that it will become a harder sell as AI advances.

“Like no matter how good AI-derived art becomes, it will become very, very, very, very good, and they’ll be cheap. Most people think, ‘Yeah, but I’m never going to want a computer-generated movie.’ If we’re being super-altruistic, obviously, but if a human-made movie still costs you twenty bucks, but for two bucks you can make a movie where you, by the way you get to scan your own face and your own voice and you get to be Superman or, better yet your kid gets to be Superman, and now you can shut them up for the next couple hours for two bucks and watch themselves be Superman in the movie, you are absolutely going to pay for that movie.” 

“I don’t think the flood is water. Honestly, I think the flood is AI.”

— Zachary Levi

The “Chuck” star also pointed out that he’s facing new competition from actors of the past whose likenesses may be signed away by their families. He explained a hypothetical situation where Gene Kelly’s descendants could sell the rights to the star’s likeness. “And then all of a sudden we’re going to get to watch Gene Kelly movies again. Like how insane! And again, I don’t want to support that, but are you kidding me?! . . . Like a new ‘Singing in the Rain’ sequel? I want to watch that, take my money!”

Levi’s example is not far off, as there have already been attempts to make a movie with an AI-resurrected James Dean, though none has been completed and released to date.

Entertainment, of course, isn’t the only industry that will see the impact of AI, and Levi urged people to stay alert.

“I don’t want to be a doomsdayer, but I cannot stress this enough, please . . . wake up to AI. Please wake up to it. It is not, ‘Oh that’s fun,’ or some passing fad or whatever. It is going to replace so many jobs, and it’s going to happen way faster than you think it’s going to happen,” he said.

“There should always be, hopefully will always be, a niche, at least a niche part of the entertainment industry where people are like, ‘I still want to go support humans making art.”

— Zachary Levi

The 44-year-old continued, saying, “In the larger grand scheme of everything, as far as technology and progress, I’m a firm believer that you can’t stop it, you can only hope to guide it. So, we’re not going to stop this flood. We can only build levees and dams and channels and things to try to make sure we’re guiding it in the best possible way. There’s still going to be casualties, there’s still going to be a lot of people who get hurt in the process, unfortunately. But I think at the end of the day, we are moving into what is going to be a whole new world, legitimately.” 

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“Ultimately, and this is part of the reason why I want to build, why I feel like I need to build the campus, or campuses plural if I can do multiple, is because I think that really, as humans, what we want to be focusing on are just, there’s two areas of vocation that mean anything anymore, moving into the future, and that’s creation and discovery.” 

He that added AI will still be a tool used in creation and discovery, but those two things are what “stimulates the human heart, mind, and soul, and I think as long as we really hold onto lots of places for people to work, because work is not just a matter of making income. Work is purpose. How many people retire, and they die just a few years after they retire, and why? Because they have nothing to do. They literally are sedentary, and we’re already sedentary a lot, and now they’re super-sedentary, and now they don’t have any purpose, and they die.”

“I think it’s important, we must have purpose as we move into this new world, but I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s going to be like for everybody else in every other industry. And I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen in entertainment. I can guess, and my guess is, in very short order people, not just the studios but everyday human beings through the various catalogs of the studios, will have access to, by the way, not just make their own movies but TV shows, video games.”