Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, who is rumored to be paid $10 million a year to work as a Salesforce adviser and showperson, sat down with CEO Marc Benioff at the Yerba Buena Theater in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood for an interview Wednesday afternoon. Hundreds of conference attendees watched the actor chat about his personal strengths and ideals and last year’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas, his hometown. He also offered a few words of skepticism about artificial intelligence on behalf of the striking Screen Actors Guild.
The conversation began with friendly banter and some discussion of McConaughey’s successful memoir, released in 2020. The actor dodged Benioff’s baiting question about political aspirations — unlike last year, when McConaughey called a presidential run potentially “inevitable” — but went long on his response to the tragedy in Uvalde.
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“We have a real chance, if we are irresponsible, of cannibalizing ourselves and creating this digital god that we’ll bow to, and we’ll all of a sudden become tools of this tool,” McConaughey said.
Benioff asked McConaughey what he thought of working with Runway, an artificial intelligence company that’s building products to automatically generate video, on a recent Salesforce ad shoot. He replied that the opportunity is “awesome,” but “with awesome comes consequences that go both ways.”
“Some of the things that my union, the SAG union, is striking about is ‘What is our future with AI?’” he continued.
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McConaughey then pointed to a flashpoint in the actors’ strike: the question of whether studios might be able to scan actors’ likenesses and then use AI technology to animate renditions of those people into later performances.
“I’d like to have the rights to me, if it’s OK,” he said. “If you’d like to have me be wherever, have me, a rendition of me, in a film of yours, or have me show up and play the bongos at your Fourth of July party … I’d like to do that deal with you.”
He then said he doesn’t think the question of how AI will work for actors is going to be answered during the strike but that it’s going to be an “ongoing negotiation.”
McConaughey seemed careful not to be too critical of the technology, especially sitting across from one of the industry’s most prominent salespeople in Benioff.
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“I’m not afraid of technology, I’m not afraid of tools,” the actor said. “Again, we just have to watch that we don’t create tools that do nothing but tool ourselves.”
Hear of anything happening at Salesforce or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.