Star Wars director Gareth Edwards gushes about “genius” AI: “A billionaire on acid”
Gareth Edwards, the filmmaker behind blockbuster hits like Jurassic World: Rebirth and Star Wars’ Rogue One, has shared his support of generative artificial intelligence, adding that he “can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t be interested in this stuff”.
In a conversation at AI on The Lot, an Amazon event held in Culver City, California, Edwards made his admiration for the divisive tool known.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, he shared with the audience, “I can’t see a reason why you wouldn’t become interested in this stuff as a filmmaker. It’s so clearly a tool that might be up there with the camera. It’s going to be better than CGI.”
Edwards was clear that he only used AI in the idea-creation stage, sharing, “It’s only good for iteration and discovering what the movie should be, and then once you know what it is, go in and start making it your movie.”
Explaining the reason behind this choice, he added, “It has no taste whatsoever. It is a fucking genius at helping you. I view it like having a second-unit director who is a billionaire on acid.”
The 50-year-old director added, “Like, it’ll do anything you ask, not a problem. Sometimes, it’ll [go] batshit crazy. And you’ll give it notes, and it’ll be like, ‘I don’t do notes. I’ll just do something totally different.’ But it’s worth it.”
The next step for the Star Wars visionary would be to create a hybrid generative-AI film. The only reason he hasn’t so far is down to the rate of change with the technology.
He elaborated, “It feels like this stuff’s changing every three months,” he said. “It’s like we have to revisit the plan six months from now because it might be a totally different series of tools. And the things that … weren’t possible three months ago or six months ago, some of them are now possible.”
Though these comments are somewhat controversial, they aren’t all that surprising. In 2023, Edwards directed The Creator, a sci-fi film with an overridingly positive approach to AI.
As such, Edwards admitted that he can’t predict the future in this space: “We don’t know where it’s going to go. I think anybody saying they know exactly what’s going to happen over the next five years is just a liar.”
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