Star Wars creator George Lucas is the latest big-name filmmaker with a depressing take on AI. He’s firmly in the “it’s the future” camp. Do we have to do this? Really? Sigh. Okay, then. George Lucas, who in the 1970s gave us movies that electrified audiences around the world because they felt so tactile and ... George Lucas on AI: “That’s progress, it’s the future”
Star Wars creator George Lucas is the latest big-name filmmaker with a depressing take on AI. He’s firmly in the “it’s the future” camp.
Do we have to do this? Really? Sigh. Okay, then. George Lucas, who in the 1970s gave us movies that electrified audiences around the world because they felt so tactile and real, has offered his thoughts on the new wave of artificial intelligence. And depressingly, he’s another big name on the “it’s inevitable” side of the argument.
Lucas recently gave an interview to the arts outlet A Rabbit’s Foot, marking the completion of The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles – a huge collection of paintings and art that is scheduled to open on the 22nd September 2026.
In it you’ll find work by Boris Vallejo, Norman Rockwell, Robert Crumb, Charles M Schultz, Ralph McQuarrie and Jack Kirby – in other words, talented artists often deemed too commercial to appear in, say, the Met or the Tate.
During that conversation about the gallery, the topic shifts to Lucas’ own work as a filmmaker, and his early adoption of digital cameras in the late 90s and 2000s – an adoption that prompted (almost) the whole industry to move away from celluloid and towards digital capture and projection within just a few years.
The way Lucas sees it, AI is just another development like the move to digital filmmaking.
“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he said. “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. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Note that Lucas isn’t endorsing the technology so much as echoing a common sentiment that it’s a reality that we’ll just have to deal with. Demi Moore expressed something similar at the Cannes Film Festival in May – the same month and venue where Lucas was interviewed.
“AI is here,” she said. “And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it I think is a more valuable path to take.”
While a growing number of filmmakers are using AI to some degree in their work, it remains to be seen whether the tech will represent the move from the buggy to the car that Lucas describes. There are drawbacks to its use as a footage generator at present – it looks photoreal, but not quite – and ethical and environmental concerns aside, it’s so ruinously expensive for its companies to generate that OpenAI recently scrapped its Sora project.
As for the “it’s inevitable” argument – well, that’s for we humans to decide. In this regard, Christopher Nolan perhaps put it best in a recent interview.
“The interesting thing with AI is I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected,” Nolan said to AFP (via The Guardian). “Young people in particular, they coined this term ‘AI slop.’ There’s a sort of disdain for things AI.”
Certain forms of AI will almost certainly be used extensively in some industries – AI being an umbrella term for multiple technologies. But when it comes to generative AI in filmmaking, the jury’s still out. If the rejection and disdain prompts audiences to stay away from movies visibly made with gen-AI, then its dominance won’t be quite so inevitable.
