Director Christopher Nolan has a reputation for tortuous storytelling. His movies elliptically jump across time (“Memento”), or move backwards through it (“Tenet”), or toy with solipsism to have us question what’s real (“Inception”). We suspect his upcoming adaptation of the classic Greek epic “The Odyssey,” which hits theaters later this month, won’t be any different.
But when the famed director decided to give his thoughts on AI, he didn’t prevaricate; instead, he straightforwardly explained why everyone — and especially the younger generations — absolutely loathe the tech.
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” Nolan said in a new interview with The Telegraph. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”
Nolan jumped on the topic after praising Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, two young directors who got their start on YouTube and whose debuts, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” were massive hits this year. In particular, he was cheered by their ambivalence towards AI, which he saw as emblematic of how the tech is being rejected by Gen Z at large. He also cited his own for children, who are in their late teens and early 20s, as further evidence.
“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh,” Nolan said of the youths. “They see it for what it is very quickly — and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well.”
“And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time,” he added. “After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
It’s a refreshingly intelligent and frank assessment of AI from a major filmmaker, which isn’t something you can take for granted. For cinephiles, recent events have been an inculcatory lesson in “never meet your heroes.” In June, for example, revered director Martin Scorsese revealed that he’d partnered with an AI startup whose tech he uses to help storyboard his movies. Weeks later, the beloved studio A24 entered a $75 million partnership with Google to develop AI tools for filmmaking, causing a crisis among fans.
That’s not to say Nolan is alone in the film industry, though. Last year, his colleague Guillermo del Toro responded memorably to a question about whether he’d ever use the tech: “I’d rather die.”
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