Emma Thompson

Dame Emma Thompson (born 1959) is the only person to win Academy Awards for both acting (Howards End, 1993) and screenwriting (Sense and Sensibility, 1996). A celebrated writer as well as performer — she adapted Austen longhand and penned the Nanny McPhee films — she has become one of British cinema’s most quotable AI skeptics.

“Will you f–k off?”

Asked about AI on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in October 2025, Thompson answered instantly: “Intense irritation. I cannot begin to tell you.” She explained that she writes longhand on a pad — “because I believe that there’s a connection between the brain and the hand” — and only then types her work into a word processor, where the software now “is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’” Her response, she said, is to tell it to f–k off: “I’m so annoyed.”

The clip went viral precisely because it captured a specific, everyday grievance: AI assistance inserted uninvited between a writer and her own words. Thompson’s complaint is less about existential risk than craft — the conviction that writing is thinking done by hand, and that unsolicited machine rewrites of an Oscar-winning screenwriter’s prose are absurd on their face. Her remarks landed amid Hollywood’s broader reckoning with generative AI following the 2023 strikes over protections won by SAG-AFTRA and the writers’ guild.