Adam McKay

Adam McKay (born 1968) came up as head writer at Saturday Night Live, spent a decade making broad comedies with Will Ferrell — Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers — and then pivoted to didactic satire about systems failure. The Big Short won him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2016; Vice and Don’t Look Up followed, the latter becoming one of Netflix’s most-watched films ever. He executive produced Succession and Winning Time, and in 2023 founded Yellow Dot Studios, a nonprofit media studio built to attack fossil-fuel disinformation.

“AI is the ultimate scab”

McKay’s opposition to generative AI is unusual less for its content than for its relentlessness. On Bluesky, where he posts as @ghostpanther, he has run what amounts to a rolling public campaign since at least mid-2025 — correcting followers who share AI images, badgering fellow climate organizations that use the tools, and tagging the case #BoycottAI.

His framing is labour-first. Replying to a thread about worker power in September 2025 he wrote: “Disrupt from within. And unionize. AI is the ultimate scab.” The line is characteristic — the objection is not that the output is bad but that the machine crosses a picket line no machine can be shamed at.

Policy, not just posts

The stance is backed by conduct. In October 2023 McKay was among the signatories — alongside Natasha Lyonne and more than 1,000 Writers Guild of America East members — of an open letter demanding AI protections for journalists, calling for guardrails on the use of generative tools in newsrooms. Yellow Dot Studios operates a stated no-AI policy; when a supporter flagged what looked like AI artwork on one of its posts in May 2025, McKay replied “We have a no AI policy. Let me look into,” then followed up: “They took it down. And we’ll post our no AI policy.”

The energy-and-water argument is the seam where his AI position joins the climate work that has consumed his last decade. It is also why he treats AI adoption by ostensible allies as a betrayal rather than a mistake — he has publicly called Bill Gates “a creep” for softening on climate urgency while Microsoft pours capital into data centres. His discipline about it borders on the comic: reposting an urgent warning in July 2026, he flagged the exception rather than let it pass — “I’m ignoring my ‘no AI’ rule just for this one repost because lots of people are going to die unless they’re made aware of what’s coming.”