Steven Soderbergh offers a bunch of the usual justifications for his AI use

“I’m just not threatened by it,” Soderbergh begins, which is probably true; he’s an acclaimed director who is less likely to have his job taken by AI than, say, writers or animators are. “I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do.” This doesn’t have to be done publicly, one would imagine, but Soderbergh continues, “It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualize what John and Yoko are speaking about philosophically.” This is the kind of thing that animators are good for, and it sounds like animation would have fit the time period in question, too. 

Soderbergh sounds like he’s aware of this. “Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer,” he says, offering a pretty good summation of why other people are threatened in a very real way by this choice. “My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it,” he adds, saying later, “There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way.”