Generative AI might threaten to destroy Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean everyone there is having the same response to it. Apollo 13 director Ron Howard is bullish on the controversial technology, and thinks puppet legend Jim Henson would have been too. The Shape of Water director Guillermo Del Toro, meanwhile, has not so subtly been subtweeting people who prioritize AI prompts over human craftsmanship. Christopher Nolan, ahead of the release of The Odyssey, believes that no matter how certain filmmakers feel about AI, one thing is clear: young people hate it.
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” he recently told The Telegraph. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”
This observation is undeniable. As companies ramp up their loud calls for AI to be inserted into every part of our lives, praising its potential to replace humans and reshape the world without our input, the public’s initial skepticism has morphed into a stiff rebuke. It doesn’t help that the most prolific product of AI currently floating around the ether is slop across online platforms people already wish they spent less time on. While boomers share deepfake memes on Facebook, younger people are increasingly trying to log off.
“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh,” Nolan said. “They see it for what it is very quickly–and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well. And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
Even before the emergence of AI, we’ve seen how the mass proliferation of content for streaming platforms has degraded the overall craft and quality. Movies filmed on location or with actors in the same room now feel refreshingly authentic and meaningful. The overreliance on green screens, special effects, and creating movies in post-production rather than capturing them in the moment, has led, as Nolan points out, to a greater hunger for art that comes more directly from humans and is less heavily mediated by technology.
Whether that will stop Hollywood’s leaders from embracing AI in exchange for boatloads of money in the meantime remains to be seen.