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The hottest director in Hollywood is no fan of AI.
While appearing on the podcast The Town with Matthew Belloni, Backrooms director Kane Parsons, who recently became the youngest director to ever helm a #1 film, said that he is not a fan of using generative AI in the filmmaking process.
Parsons first distinguished between using AI as a tool to do “menial tasks” such as rotoscoping — an animation technique used to create movement — and using the tool to generate entire backdrops.
“Barring menial tasks like rotoscoping and whatnot, I personally am very opposed to the use of it in my work and in creative work in general,” Parsons said. “I think most VFX artists I know feel the same way.” He added, “You won’t be hard-pressed to find an artist saying the same thing I am.”
Parsons went on to give his reasons for being against AI in the use of moviemaking. While he understands the use of newer technologies to make films, he said that it all comes down to the fact that the use of generative AI means that he knows an artist is not making choices about his art, and that it was instead made arbitrarily by a program.
“You lose such an extreme degree of creative specificity,” Parsons said. “When I see in a project online that generative fill or some sort of generative AI has been used in some way for some detail, the part of my brain that desires to really live with a piece of art and look into the details and the nooks and crannies and get excited about what I might see in the background, or look for little details — and just look for a general deliberate richness in the set direction — that immediately goes away.”
He continued, “If the artist is willing to make that completely arbitrary choice and whatever tool they’re using to create, that piece of media is going to obviously not be something that came from them, it’s something they didn’t place there.”
Finally, he added, ““If it becomes arbitrary, I’m then open to conclude almost any choice in that project is arbitrary on a human level.”
Parsons’s doubts about the use of generative artificial intelligence comes at a time when more movie stars and directors seem to have taken a fatalistic approach to the technology, with many implying that Hollywood needs to get on board with AI’s takeover.
While speaking at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the jury, Oscar nominee Demi Moore said that “AI is here” and that Hollywood must find ways in which we can work with it,” per Variety.
“I always feel that against-ness breeds against-ness,” she said. “To fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose.”
Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese has also recently garnered backlash for pro-AI comments. On Tuesday, Scorsese announced that he was joining an AI startup, Black Forest Labs, that was focused on image generation.
“I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences,” Scorsese told the New York Times in a statement. “Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”
Despite Hollywood’s seemingly warm embrace to AI technology, Parsons’ skepticism is in line with his generation’s thinking on the matter. Despite just about half of Gen Zers saying they use AI weekly, negative associations with it have grown in the last year, according to Gallup.
Since 2025, Gen Z has become both more angry (31% in 2026 vs. 22% in 2025) and slightly more anxious (42% vs. 41%) about the proliferation of AI, while they have also become noticeably less excited (22% vs. 36%) and hopeful (18% vs. 27%) than a year ago.
The lack of enthusiasm for AI has become palpable at graduation ceremonies across the nation. As commencement speakers bring up the possibilities of the technology in the years to come, graduates — whose jobs are already being lost to AI — have roundly booed them, with heckling happening at ceremonies from the University of Central Florida to the University of Arizona.
The entertainment business is set to be particularly harshly hit by the AI boom: a 2024 study found that, through 2027, about 204,000 jobs would be lost to AI, per The Hollywood Reporter.
