It sounds like Ben Affleck has been working on a lot more than just Dunkin’ commercials over the past few years.
Netflix announced on Thursday that it has acquired InterPositive, Affleck’s company that creates AI-powered tools for filmmakers. The news comes after it was revealed earlier this week that Artist Equity, the production company helmed by Affleck and Matt Damon, has entered into a first-look deal with the streaming giant.
According to Netflix’s announcement, the entire InterPositive team will join Netflix, with Affleck also coming along for the ride to serve as a senior adviser. The announcement also included a note from the Cambridge-raised Oscar winner, with Affleck writing that, starting in 2022, he “spent a lot of time observing the early rise of AI in production” and got into the space as he felt he had a “responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it.”
“Together with a small team of engineers, researchers, and creatives, I began filming a proprietary dataset on a controlled soundstage with all the familiarities of a full production,” Affleck wrote. “I wanted to build a workflow that captures what happens on a set, with vocabulary that matched the language cinematographers and directors already spoke and included the kind of consistency and controls they would expect.”
In a video interview with Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria and chief product and technology officer Elizabeth Stone, Affleck revealed that he was worried about AI technology growing “outside of the ecosystem of filmmakers and artists.”
“I saw what I thought was a real opportunity and a real authentic danger,” Affleck said in the video. “But most importantly, I thought this is a really meaningful innovation.”
The actor and director goes on to explain that InterPositive is a tool for filmmakers designed to connect them more to the process of filmmaking, using AI to build unique models based on a project’s film dailies.
“It’s not about text prompting or generating something from nothing,” Affleck explained. “You’re building a model from your own material. That’s how this works.”
“You have to create your movie, essentially, first before you can really build your model around your movie using AI,” he added. “And once you do that, you have your model. You control it.”
In a statement from Stone included in Thursday’s acquisition announcement, Netflix’s chief product and technology officer said that the streamer is teaming up with Affleck’s company because of their “shared belief that innovation should empower storytellers, not replace them.”
“InterPositive’s impressive technology is purpose-built for filmmakers and showrunners to work with tools that naturally support their creative visions and how they want to bring them to life,” Stone said.
Meanwhile, Affleck said in his written message that he “couldn’t be happier” to partner with Netflix and looks “forward to providing the broader creative community with access to what we build and the future we’re working towards together.”
Matt Juul can be reached at matthew.juul@globe.com.