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Emma Thompson is making it clear that artificial intelligence has no place in her creative space. During her appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the Oscar-winning actor and screenwriter expressed strong disapproval of AI’s intrusion into the writing process, saying it fills her with “intense irritation.” Discussing her writing routine, Thompson said she remains loyal to traditional methods. “I write longhand on a pad – old script, actually – because I believe there is a connection between the brain and the hand,” she shared, explaining that she later transfers her handwritten drafts to a computer. However, even that step has become frustrating for her. “Recently, the Word document is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’” she revealed. “And so I end up just going, ‘I don’t need you to rewrite what I’ve just written, will you fk off?! Just fk off!’ I’m so annoyed,” she exclaimed, earning laughter from the audience. When Colbert suggested that perhaps she should remind her computer who’s in charge by showing it her Oscar, Thompson responded with a laugh: “I don’t think it would care.” Thompson went on to recall a time when technology failed her completely while she was finishing the screenplay for her Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility. “I remember once when I was finishing Sense and Sensibility on the computer,” she said, “and I came back from the loo to find that it had changed the entire script into hieroglyphs… completely gone, the script.” She sought help from her close friend, actor and writer Stephen Fry, to recover the document — but the results were far from ideal. “It came out in one long sentence,” she remembered, jokingly adding, “The computer had taken it and hidden it… like it had done it on purpose.” Thompson, who continues to champion human creativity over automation, was on The Late Show to promote her new Apple TV+ series Down Cemetery Road, which premiered on October 29.
