Hollywood has spent the last few years wrestling with digital tech, shrinking margins, and a frustrated audience that’s grown tired of lectures along with lackluster box office returns. Now, actor Simu Liu has stepped into the arena, sounding off about the rise of AI in filmmaking. And at the center of the artificial intelligence debate is the idea of using AI to supplement — or replace — background actors.
The latest spark came when investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary suggested AI could cut Hollywood budgets by scanning extras rather than hiring large crowds of people. Liu, who has long portrayed himself as a voice for working-class actors, fired back hard on social media.
“Sure, blame the extras making $15-$22 an hour struggling to make a living and not above the line people making multiple millions,” he said.
Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) in Marvel Studios‘ SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS. Photo by Jasin Boland. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.
The Shang-Chi and Barbie “star” didn’t stop there. In an interview promoting his upcoming Netflix project, Liu called O’Leary’s argument out of touch.
“First of all, I thought that take that I was responding to is a really dumb take, particularly really tone deaf and out of touch and also just kind of incorrect,” he said. “The idea that these background actors who are making minimum wage are somehow the reason why movies are now costing too much, that’s simply not true.”
Liu continued arguing that film should remain a human craft, stopping short of offering to cut down his immense salaries on films to offset the costs.
“This idea of replacing actors with AI, it’s so antithetical to my development as an actor,” he said. “I feel like art is art because it’s human.”
Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) in Marvel Studios’ SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS. Photo by Jasin Boland. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.
He also added: “I feel like when we see somebody in the background not moving like a human, we know.”
Hollywood defenders often bring up the “I started as an extra” argument, and Liu is no exception.
Yes, he came from that world — but that doesn’t magically grant him the moral high ground here. What matters isn’t whether someone once stood behind the camera; it’s the broader reality that Hollywood keeps sermonizing about noble causes while ignoring what actually drove audiences away.
Entry-level creative jobs matter — but they are not the heart of Hollywood’s crisis. Broken storytelling, inflated egos, and treating viewers like a problem to be managed instead of a customer to serve — that’s the real wound, and AI didn’t cause it.
(L-R): Katy (Awkwafina) and Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) in Marvel Studios’ SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS. Photo by Jasin Boland. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Meanwhile, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro recently echoed anti-AI sentiment in far more dramatic fashion, claiming he’d “rather die” than use generative AI.
This statement drew applause from some corners of Hollywood — but for many viewers, the bigger concern isn’t whether a director uses digital tools. It’s whether studios finally deliver movies and shows that entertain instead of preach.
The Bigger Picture
AI isn’t vanishing just because Simu Liu is mad about it. Whether Hollywood likes it or not, the technology isn’t going back into the bottle. It already touches visual effects, editing, and concept design, and its presence will only expand. The panic isn’t about technology — it’s about a shaken industry trying to hold on to power and relevance.
Simu Liu sits for an interview – YouTube, Peacock
Audiences aren’t worried about scanned extras. They’re worried about being talked down to, charged more for less, and subjected to declining creative standards. If the Simu Liu AI debate proves anything, it’s that the industry continues to focus on internal squabbles instead of winning back paying customers.
Hollywood insists it’s fighting for “art” and “humanity.” What viewers want is simple: good stories again. If the film industry can’t deliver, technology isn’t the threat — audience abandonment is.
How do you feel about Simu Liu and AI in Hollywood? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
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Irrelevant and out of touch actor makes irrelevant and out of touch statement. You can’t beat progress, though, like Stupid here, you can fight against it. But you don’t adapt and you’ll lose out. In the 80s it was people who couldn’t set the clock on their VCR, in the 90s it was people who couldn’t manage computers and the internet. Then in the 2000s and 2010s the people who couldn’t adapt or didn’t want smart phones. Today it is AI.
There has always been a contingent of luddites at every technological breakthrough. Those who’s livelihood and training is entirely centered around the old model are going to be the most resistant.
I suspect most media is going to see performances by real people as an anachronism, throwback, or oddity. You see this in movie like a movie tailored just for IMAX like Interstellar or something filmed on 70mm like The Hateful 8, or when Lucas started making movies using digital cameras.
Plus, for someone like Semen Lui, he knows even a poorly trained AI can render a better performance than this grievance grifter.
I reckon there is a demand for real humans in the arts. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. The idea of an AI-slop movie does not appeal to me at all. I hate that AI “look”, for starters, and they’ll never really fix that, because LLMs “hallucinate” errors by their very nature. You cannot perfect them, they’re this wobbly, eccentric black box.
They CAN be used for deep-fakes, if you don’t look too closely.
I’ll agree with him this much: if AI becomes humanity’s primary source of “original art”, then we’re screwed. What if AI became our primary source of love? Literature? Wisdom? Unless you’re firmly in your mama’s basement, you don’t want computers replacing human interaction and connection, so if you’re rooting for AI to take over entertainment, I don’t think you’re thinking it through. We all hate the Marxist left that is Hollywood, but what price will we pay for a short-term victory?
I agree, to a certain extent. But it gets harder and harder to find real creativity in the arts these days. For most of the rest it makes junk or something highly derivative.
Of course, Gen AI and Super AI are still fever dreams and current AI can’t create something unless a human has already created it at least once (and the AI has been able to train on it). But they can be a huge force multiplier for those who are good at what they do already and are willing to put effort into tweaking the output.
It is like the Chinese firms I used to work with. Give them the blueprint or schematic along with a process and they’ll figure out how to make something better, faster, cheaper, and maybe even be able to come up with interesting variations. But they struggle to come up with original ideas/blueprints and processes.
That doesn’t mean a thing that is derivative can’t be good or high quality or you can’t enjoy the produc, just that we can’t ignore it is derivative or lacks meaning. Dennis McKernan’s Iron Tower trilogy tracks pretty close to The Lord of the Rings. But it is still, IMO, a fun, well written series. He has another “The Silver Call” duology where he has a team go in and retake what are his world’s version of the Mines of Moria. Fun books, but derivative.
Still, when I think of art these days I see a banana duct taped to the wall being noteworthy and admired. A guy who dribbles different color paint while a pendulum swings over the canvas can sell the result for 10s of thousands of dollars. You can like it, but the end user is the one who has to do the work of giving it meaning or purpose.
Most of the movies coming out this holiday season are almost sequels, remakes, or adaptations.
Adaptations are rarely true to the source material but event hey have patterns that are easy to follow… like a paint-by-numbers. Take the original, pick a little from column A and a little from column B to “make it your own.”
Music uses remixing, technology, or sampling so much that there are artists who can’t tour because they sound awful outside a studio where a producer can use a whole back of tricks to make the person sound good.
How much worse can “art” get if AI takes over the heavy lifting?
“We all hate the Marxist left that is Hollywood, but what price will we pay for a short-term victory?“
What is considered “victory”, though? Eventually, it will boil down to mainstream Hollywood vs. AI, and it’ll be up to the people to decide which one is the lesser evil. There will likely be some studios who won’t resort to AI, and will still rely on human creators and human performers, but I have a nasty feeling that those studios are going to be few and far between.
Therefore, if, or more than likely when, it comes down to the wannabe activist writers at studios like Disney vs. an AI program controlled by a wannabe activist, I don’t think that’s really a fight anybody wins.
These are orthogonal issues. A woke director will make a woke movie, with actors, or with AI. Especially with AI, which are programmed to be woke. (Bias).
Whether to use AI to replace actors is orthogonal to the issue of woke messaging. I sense that Actors will get replaced by AI, starting with extras and then minor roles. Why? Because AI is a digital actor sweat shop. No Unions. Works 24/7. And AI doesn’t bitch about “Trump” on Social Media. And AI doesn’t tell the potential audience NOT to watch the movie, if they don’t agree with some woke b*tch. (Zegler, etc.)
Curiously, AI in movies may bring about boycotts by the Woke, more than right wingers. So what diminished audiences movies now have (Soyboys and lesbians) will themselves boycott their Hollywood masters due to AI.
As for preferring humans to AI, I absolutely do agree with the actors (for once). If a movie featured, say, 95% AI-generated humans, I simply wouldn’t want to watch that. It’s freaking AI Slop. I’m a techie, I even like well-done CGI in reasonable moderation, even (except in Disney’s incompetent cheapo-CGI case). But, if everything is generated by AI, then, nah, I’m out of there.
Simu Liu is barely human. I wouldn’t distinguish him from a AI generated actor.