Justine Bateman Wants to “Give a Book of Matches” to the Tech Companies So They Can..

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...Burn Down Hollywood

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...020541285.html

Steven Zeitchik
Sat, March 29, 2025 at 7:05 PM PDT

When it comes to Hollywood’s AI future, few have been more vocal — or critical — than Justine Bateman.

Armed with a computer science degree from UCLA, the veteran actor-filmmaker has sounded an alarm about the dangers of replacing human work with machine fabrication. She became a lead voice during the strikes when she advised SAG-AFTRA on the issue and was a public face of the AI-skeptic movement on the WGA picket line.

Bateman is the founder of Credo 23, a two-year-old organization that believes Generative AI “will destroy the structure of the film business” and has set as its goal “making very human, very raw, very real films/series that respect the process of filmmaking.”

As Hollywood begins to cautiously dance with text-to-video tools like OpenAI’s Sora and as the company makes Miyazaki-esque images available (to no small furor), Bateman is renewing her call. The Family Ties star and Violet director argues a movement is growing — that it needs to grow — to combat a drift to the synthetic using organic material human both in creation and sensibility.

She calls this movement a drive toward “the new” — a push to restore a humanity to filmmaking that she says has been lost since the algorithms began dictating content choices last decade and that will be further torched by AI.

Her mission is a kind of populism we’re likely to soon see across a host of industries (she is close with Sean O’Brien, leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters). Several high-profile creators have joined her push, including Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and noted cinematographer and The Handmaid’s Tale director Reed Morano.

To platform the movement, Bateman has founded the Credo 23 Film Festival — a “filmmaker-first, no-AI event” in which movies can contain nothing machine-generated (visual effects are OK, as they’re driven by humans). She says she will give all profits from the festival to the filmmakers to support them and fund their next film.

Credo 23 is taking place this weekend at Hollywood American Legion Post 43 just south of the Hollywood Bowl, showcasing about 30 shorts and features. They range from pieces like Ethan Krahn’s avant garde Meditation on a Room to Callie Carpinteri’s teen-drama Tribeca hit Dirty Towel, as well as two Bateman-helmed features, Look and Feel, the latter starring David Duchovny and Rae Dawn Chong. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Bateman before the festival.