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Veteran actor Manoj Bajpayee offered a candid take on artificial intelligence and its growing presence in the entertainment industry during the session 'Tales Untold: Playing Real Heroes' at the India@2047 Conclave hosted by ABP Network. Speaking to ABP, he addressed one of the biggest debates shaking the entertainment world right now, whether AI will eventually make actors, writers, and singers redundant. His answer was measured, thoughtful, and rooted in a very simple truth that no machine can live a life for you.

When Technology Meets Storytelling

Bajpayee recalled watching a video just before the interview, where someone made a striking observation about how far AI microchips could take the world. He shared that a future is being imagined where a single broadcast from one centre reaches the entire world, where screens play above you as you lie down. He acknowledged this vision of tomorrow as fascinating, but quickly turned the conversation to the question nobody in the AI debate seems to be answering convincingly enough which is where does the content come from?

"Can it always give something new?" he asked. For Bajpayee, that is the real gap. AI can pull from what already exists in the public domain, remix it, and present it. But creating something genuinely new is a different matter altogether.

'Our Need Will Always Be There'

What AI cannot replicate, according to Bajpayee, is lived experience. The nuances of a character, the emotional weight behind a performance, the understanding of what a particular life actually feels like, these come from human beings who have lived, observed, and felt. He pointed out that the person or system sitting behind the technology simply cannot grasp those values or understand a character from the inside out.

Talking about this he said, "Where will the subject matter come from? Where will you get the software from? Even if you create that software, can it truly produce something new every time? And how can you capture a person's life, experiences, and the subtle nuances of human existence through AI? You simply can't."

That, according to him, is what directors and actors bring to the table. It is a craft built on experience, not data. And no matter how advanced the technology gets, that human element will remain essential to creating stories that feel real and resonate with audiences.

Summing up his thoughts, he expressed confidence that human creativity will always remain at the heart of cinema by saying, "We will always be needed, we will always be there."