AGBO Execs Tell Tokyo: AI Can Judge Shakespeare, Not Write It

AI can determine whether a play found in an attic was written by Shakespeare, but ask it to write its own and "you'd have the sense that it was written by a 12-year-old." That was the verdict of Dominic Hughes, chief scientific officer of the Russo brothers' production company AGBO, at TIFFCOM, the content market of the Tokyo International Film Festival, on Thursday.

Hughes appeared alongside Chris Brearton, AGBO partner and business leader, for a keynote on AI's impact on filmmaking. AGBO, headquartered in Los Angeles, has produced "Extraction" (2020), "Everything Everywhere All at Once" (2022), "The Gray Man" (2022), "Extraction 2" (2023) and "The Electric State" (2025). Variety's Asia Editor Naman Ramachandran moderated.

What does AGBO actually claim?

The core pitch: AI assists, it does not replace. Hughes said AI is good at "regurgitating what has been done in the past" but weak at original creation: "Machines don't have the creativity required for that degree of novelty." Even artificial general intelligence, he argued, would not doom top-tier artists — "people who are at the pinnacle of their arts," the Brahmses and Beethovens, cannot be replicated by a machine.

Brearton conceded that "there is a lot of misinformation" about AI's role and acknowledged the industry's fear: "There's a concern that it's going to replace us all." What makes a favorite actor's performance special, he said, "is the human element" that AI cannot equal. He expects AI to matter most "particularly in the midterm, in process efficiencies" — fixing problems that slow creative work. "We really think it's an empowerment," he said.

The studio cites its own history as evidence. Founders Anthony and Joe Russo, working on the Emmy-winning "Arrested Development," received a script too long and expensive to produce. They used digital cameras and editing to make it anyway. "They looked at technology as a solution that empowered them to tell the story they wanted to tell," Brearton said. Walt Disney is the other model — and in 2026, Brearton said, AGBO is "using technology to build a virtual theme park, a virtual community bringing people together."

Practical uses — and caveats

• Script development. Struggling with a third-act character? AI "can provide data," Brearton said. "Not a solution, but data."
• Lower budgets. AI can "democratize storytelling": "We'll see new filmmakers making movies that otherwise you wouldn't have seen."
• Quality control. Hughes warned AI can generate endless mediocre content "but consumers can't possibly absorb it." The only answer, he said, is "to raise the bar on quality."
• Support roles. Will AI take the jobs of those making stage backdrops for the Mozarts? "If you want to produce something for the ages, you need many humans involved in that loop," Hughes said.

On copyright — the question the keynote did not raise until asked — Brearton said AGBO tracks "every single tool and every single usage of every single tool" and keeps a comprehensive "paper trail of who did what." His caveat: "You have to be intentional about this. This is not 'let's do something on the fly.'"

Hughes, who has an academic background in algorithms and machine learning, played cello for orchestras and spent his teens "going down the rabbit hole" of 3D rendering and game creation. At AGBO, he said, his role "is really about supporting artists to be more and more creative," with a human always "sitting on top and curating to make sure the algorithms are not running on their own." He pointed to Pixar's 3D rendering as precedent: technology "played a supporting role."

Brearton closed with the future: "concurrence." His son consumes four or five media sources at once across devices. Suppliers, he said, must build "worlds that tell stories across all of those platforms concurrently" — while still creating "incredible stories with wonderful characters in a rich world to live in." The claim is easy to make; whether the 2026 virtual theme park proves it is another matter.