When Ben Affleck sold his artificial-intelligence firm to Netflix, the explanation was almost poetic: he wanted to „protect the power of human creativity“. Now we know the price of that protection too - 587 million dollars (about 512 million euros) in cash, disclosed in a regulatory filing, not in a press release.

The firm is called InterPositive and Netflix announced the purchase back in March, without a number. The number arrived quietly, through a document to the regulators. An earlier Bloomberg report estimated the deal could reach as much as 600 million dollars - so 587 is exactly where everyone expected it, just confirmed in black and white.

What does InterPositive do? According to Affleck himself, AI tools help filmmakers „fix“ footage in post-production - fill in missing frames, swap backgrounds, correct bad lighting. The whole team moves to Netflix, and Affleck becomes a senior advisor.

Here is the paradox worth holding onto. The man who vowed to defend human creativity sold his AI firm to a company that, in its latest financial report, admitted that around 300 of its titles already used generative artificial intelligence. Protecting creativity, or just polishing the very tool that replaces it?

Hollywood went through this with the writers' and actors' strikes just a few years ago - back then, AI was a line not to be crossed. Today an Oscar-winning actor sells his own AI firm for over half a billion. The line didn't vanish, it just moved into a regulatory filing that hardly anyone reads.