George Lucas says AI makes filmmaking “easier”: “There’s nothing you can do about it”
George Lucas has weighed in on the divisive debate surrounding the usage of AI in the film industry, endorsing it as inevitable “progress”.
The beloved Star Wars creator recently appeared on A Rabbit’s Foot where he shared several blunt remarks on the use of AI in filmmaking, revealing that the technology makes it “much easier for us to make movies”.
The filmmaker went on, “It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Lucas concluded, “That’s progress, it’s the future.” When pressed to weigh up the ethical drawbacks of the technology, the director focused his attention on the solutions AI can come up with.
He shared, “If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that. Humans can’t, we’re not that smart.”
The 82-year-old explained, “The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal, you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognised. It’s just like real life.”
Lucas appears to be more accepting of the new technology than many other filmmakers, like Backrooms mastermind Kane Parsons, who deemed the tool a form of “cultural rot”.
However, Lucas isn’t alone in his acceptance of AI, as Taxi Driver director Martin Scorsese recently faced plenty of backlash after his endorsement, announced alongside the news that he had become a partner of the image generation company Black Forest Labs.
Elsewhere in the new interview, the veteran director lashed out at focus groups, sharing that he believes that “the audience doesn’t know what they want to see. If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why. But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie.”
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