Steven Spielberg has made his position on artificial intelligence in Hollywood absolutely clear, and there is no ambiguity about where he stands.
Talking about Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson IMO In the podcast, the legendary director said he has no interest in AI playing any creative role in filmmaking, drawing a firm line between what he considers a legitimate use of the technology and what he considers a fundamental threat to the art form.
“Where I don’t love AI is when it takes a position or there’s an empty chair at a writer’s table,” Spielberg said.
“I’m not willing to replace it, you know, because I don’t really believe in sentience. I don’t think there’s any 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 to how I will practice my own craft of producing and directing in the future.”
He was willing to give the technology some limited utility, helping with location scouting, for example, or saving production teams time on logistics work.
But the moment AI is asked to intervene in the creative decisions that define a film, he is left out entirely.
“Don’t tell me how to write my dialogue for this character. Don’t tell me where the camera has to go. And don’t tell me what the set should look like, unless AI is just a tool in a production designer’s big toolbox,” he said.
“Use AI as a tool, but don’t use it as the last word on anything creative. That’s where I draw the line.”
Spielberg is in good company.
Leonardo DiCaprio expressed similar concerns to time magazine in December, arguing that genuine art requires a human being at its center and that anything produced by AI, no matter how technically impressive, lacks the anchoring that makes creative work last.
“I think anything that’s going to be truly considered art has to come from a human being,” DiCaprio said, describing AI-generated musical mixes as momentarily dazzling but ultimately hollow, brilliant for fifteen minutes before fading into “the ether of other Internet garbage. There’s no anchor to it. There’s no humanity in it, no matter how brilliant it is.”
Two of the most respected voices in Hollywood, then, come to the same conclusion through different paths. The soul of cinema, both maintain, is not something that can be codified.
