Steven Spielberg has made his position on artificial intelligence in Hollywood clear, and there is no ambiguity about where he stands.
Speaking on Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s remarks IMO podcast, the legendary director said he has no interest in AI playing a creative role in filmmaking, drawing a firm line between what he considers a legitimate use of the technology and what he sees as a fundamental threat to the art form.
“Where I don’t like AI is when it takes a stand or when there’s an empty chair at a writer’s table,” Spielberg said.
“I don’t want to replace, you know, because I don’t really believe in sentience. I don’t believe there’s a substitute for the soul. I don’t think it’s an inventable algorithm…A computer that thinks it feels more than we feel is anathema to the way I was raised and the way I will pursue my own craft as a producer and director in the future.”
He was prepared to grant the technology a limited usefulness, for example by helping with location research, or by allowing production teams to save time on logistics bases.
But as soon as AI is asked to weigh in on the creative decisions that define a film, it is completely shut out.
“Don’t tell me how to write my dialogue for this character. Don’t tell me where the camera should go. And don’t tell me what the setting should look like, unless the AI is just one tool in the production designer’s big toolbox,” he said.
“Use AI as a tool, but don’t use AI as the final word on everything creative. That’s where I draw the line.”
Spielberg is in good company.
Leonardo DiCaprio expressed similar concerns to Time review in December, arguing that true art requires a human being at its center and that anything produced by AI, no matter how technically impressive, lacks the anchor that makes creative work last.
“I think anything that is authentically considered art has to come from a human being,” DiCaprio said, describing AI-generated musical mashups as momentarily dazzling but ultimately hollow, shining for fifteen minutes before disappearing into “the ether of other Internet garbage. There’s no anchor. There’s no humanity, no matter how brilliant it is.”
Two of Hollywood’s most respected voices therefore arrive at the same conclusion by different routes. The soul of cinema, they both argue, is not something that can be coded.
