Per Deadline: “My official answer is, AI is good because it’s the very beginning of the human race finally seriously thinking about what only humans can do. But my personal answer is, I’m going to organize a military squad, and their mission is to destroy AI.”
Bong’s sentiment—and especially the latter part—was echoed by jury members like Celine Song and Jenna Ortega, who each took their shot at trying to explain how incredible depressing the idea of taking all of human creativity, dropping it into a woodchipper, and then boiling an ocean to make the woodchipper run, could be. Song: “To quote Guillermo del Toro, who will be here at this festival, ‘Fuck AI’… the way that it is completely destroyed the planet… the way that it is completely colonizing our minds in the way that we encounter images and sound, I’m very concerned about it… the thing I’m actually more worried about than anything, is the way that it is trying to encroach on what makes our lives very, very beautiful and very, very hard, and what makes living worth doing.”
Ortega expressed similar sentiments, including a hope that human brains will soon start treating AI-generated content like junk food: “I don’t want to assume for the audience, but I would hope it gets to a point where it becomes some sort of mental junk food, AI and looking at the screen, and then suddenly we all feel sick, and we don’t know why, and then that one independent filmmaker in their backyard comes out with something, and it releases this new excitement again.”
Meanwhile, Titane‘s Julia Ducournau was the only member of the jury to treat the technology with even minimal respect, noting that, while it would be “wrong and immoral” to replace workers on a project, “In Alpha, my latest film, we used it for CGI and it really did help us a lot. However, I really believe that at no point should AI take over human work and human interaction. I cannot have an artistic dialog with AI. I can have an artistic dialog with my CGI supervisor in the way we’re going to use that tool. I think that it should just remain a tool.”
