“No generative AI was used in the making of this film,” directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote in the end credits of their new horror, Heretic.
Film history is peppered with unusual entries in end credits, including recipes for chocolate brownies and pointed messages to a certain California school board. To those we can add the one tucked away in the end crawl of Heretic, the religious horror released in UK cinemas last week.
As pointed out by Variety, co-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have put a message in its end credits which states, “No generative AI was used in the making of this film.”
The film itself isn’t about technology, but rather about a pair of Mormon missionaries – played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East – who find themselves in the home of Hugh Grant’s rather sinister academic, Mr Reed. Still, its filmmakers felt it was important to put something in the credits that distanced them and their movie from the nascent tech.
“We have no illusions that when people watch Heretic they’re going to go, ‘Wait, did they use generative AI?’” Scott Beck told Variety. “It doesn’t feel like that at all, but it was important for us to put that out there because we think it’s something people need to start talking about.”
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Generative AI has, of course, been a major talking point over the past year or so, triggering strikes in Hollywood and lengthy debates about everything from its moral and copyright implications to its environmental impact. Beck and co-director Bryan Woods are unequivocal in their dislike for AI and the way it uses existing art to generate text, sound or images.
Said Woods, “I think this idea that an algorithm can just scrape all of human history and art off the internet, repackage it, regurgitate it, spit it out and somebody else can use that to create profit … I don’t know why that’s legal. It’s important for people to start talking about the need for human intersection in art, business and every facet of this life, because we’re on the precipice of every job on planet Earth being replaced overnight. It’s going to happen so fast. And it’s easy for it to happen in the arts. We’re in a business that is exceptionally greedy. Decisions are made for the bottom line and not for the good of the artistic process.”
A24, the independent studio behind Heretic, is said to be “fine with” Beck and Woods’ end credits message, though the company has also had a brush with AI controversy itself in recent months. While Alex Garland’s dystopian thriller Civil War was on its cinema run in April, A24 published a batch of images on its Instagram page, all of which appeared to have been generated using some form of AI software.
Read more: Heretic and the rise of the modern religious horror movie
Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to react to the rapid growth of AI; at this stage, it’s still unclear whether it will even deliver on the lofty promises made by the companies that make its software. OpenAI’s Sora, which turns text to video clips, could one day be used to generate scenes or entire films algorithmically, at least according to its proponents. Whether that comes to pass or not, Beck and Woods have picked a side; while they concede that it’s impressive as a technological breakthrough, they also argue that it’s potentially civilisation-endingly dangerous.
“AI is an amazing technology,” Woods said. “Beautiful things will come of it, and it’s jaw-dropping. What is being created with generative AI and video … it’s amazing we could create that technology. Now let’s bury it underground with nuclear warheads, cause it might kill us all.”
