In a new Esquire cover interview, the 62-year-old actor Brad Pitt said he heard an AI-generated track that was better than expected but found it repetitive, adding it was "never going to land the way a person singing lands." Pitt’s remarks on AI emerged from a discussion about why his upcoming film *Heart of the Beast* shot in New Zealand—citing tax breaks—and shifted to visual effects, framing AI not as art but as accounting. He expressed concern for films in the forty- to ninety-million-dollar range that are neither franchises nor micro-budget indies, saying that despite pushback, AI used as a tool is what gets those films made. Pitt, co-founder of Plan B, noted that cost savings from AI have been slow to appear on balance sheets, and at least one recent AI-assisted production landed at a budget that would have embarrassed a practical shoot. He also said he has been body-scanned on sets for two decades and has always written clauses into his contracts giving him ownership of those scans so he can destroy them, joking he should have kept them and blaming the habit on being a paranoid Ozark boy. Asked if a director could make *Heart of the Beast* with a synthetic Pitt, he said it depends who is directing the emotion and sifting outputs, conceding a machine could produce a performance but it wouldn't contain his choices. He cited a night in Paris watching Thom Yorke and Flea play Marvin Gaye covers with a jazz band