Anti-AIPerson

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Filmmaker

Five-time Oscar-winning Mexican director of Birdman and The Revenant. Calls the AI moment “terrifying,” and used his 2026 induction into El Colegio Nacional to declare AI-generated imagery “the beauty of a terrifying void” — art severed from lived human experience.

Director Filmmaker Entertainment

Wikipedia

In his words

Maybe I’m trying to be positive here, but it’s so terrifying that I would like to find something that possibly can bring us to something good about it.

— The Guardian, 2026

For me, it is the beauty of a terrifying void, the illustration of vanity and banality.

— El Colegio Nacional address (translated from Spanish), 2026

Biography

Alejandro González Iñárritu (born 1963 in Mexico City) broke through with Amores Perros in 2000 and became the first Mexican director to win the Academy Award for Best Director — then won it again the next year. His five Oscars span Birdman (picture, director, screenplay) and The Revenant (director), and his VR installation Carne y Arena earned a special Academy Award. Few living filmmakers carry comparable institutional prestige.

“The beauty of a terrifying void”

In May 2026 Iñárritu became the first filmmaker ever inducted into El Colegio Nacional, Mexico’s most exclusive learned society, and devoted his inaugural address — titled “La alucinación consensuada” (“the consensual hallucination”) — to artificial intelligence. Behind AI-generated images, he told the audience, there was no one who loved, suffered, raised children, or made mistakes; art, he argued, “is not the result, it is the transmission of one human experience to another.” He warned that synthetic media would push people to doubt everything they see.

The speech crystallized views he had been airing for months. Promoting his Sueño Perro exhibition of unseen Amores Perros footage in early 2026, he told The Guardian that “the physicality of it is a statement against AI,” that the technology’s ramifications were terrifying, and that the deepening AI “crisis” in culture might ultimately force artists “to go back to basics.”