Robert De Niro weighs in on the future of AI in Hollywood: 'Everybody's worried'

Robert De Niro experienced a career first shooting the biographical drama The Alto Knights as he took on dual starring roles in the gangster film. The Oscar-winning actor plays two of New York's most notorious mob bosses, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, in the film about their rivalry and essentially, the end of organized crime.

Although the production didn't rely on artificial intelligence for scenes between both characters — just "good old-fashioned hair and makeup" — De Niro acknowledged AI is something that has the entertainment industry on edge.

"Everybody's worried," the 81-year-old actor told Yahoo Entertainment. "I was talking to somebody the other day who was saying that they were trying to recreate a similar script to a well-known story, and they put it all together with different elements of AI — and they came up with a pretty good thing."

More than 400 stars and executives, including Ben Stiller, Paul McCartney and Olivia Wilde, sent an open letter to the Trump administration last week expressing concern over proposals from OpenAI and Google that would "freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries," including Hollywood.

"You can’t replace people," De Niro explained, adding that real people working on these productions are the "heart and soul" of cinema. He said his voice was used "a little bit" by The Alto Knights' director, Barry Levinson, for the film's narration after it was shot two years ago.

"I hear it. It sounds weird," De Niro said, "but we did use it in that sense."

As for the AI’s place in cinema, he said, “Who knows?”

"I don't know where it's really going to go. It's going to go somewhere and we're going to have to deal with it," De Niro added. "And hopefully, there'll be good things about it and there'll be bad things, with criminal intent [and] people up to no good. You're going to have to deal with that, too."

The Alto Knights reunites De Niro with some of the the team behind Goodfellas and Casino, including its producer Irwin Winkler and writer Nick Pileggi. The actor said it was "a nice homecoming to do this." That’s partly why he was ready and willing to take on both roles.

"It justified doing a gangster movie again," he said, "and I needed very little excuse to do another movie with them."

The Alto Knights is in theaters on March 21.