Ari Aster
Filmmaker
The writer-director of Hereditary and Eddington has spoken with unusual dread about AI, calling reliance on it “very frightening” and warning that artists and ordinary people “have no say” in a change he fears is “already too late” to stop.
In his words
On whether the world can steer AI, Aster’s verdict was bleak: “We have no say,” and it is already too late.
Biography
Ari Aster (born 1986) is an American writer-director known for dread-soaked, formally daring films — Hereditary (2018), Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, and the 2025 paranoia Western Eddington, which folds pandemic-era conspiracy and technological anxiety into its story.
“Already too late”
Aster has talked about AI in unusually foreboding terms. He has called the prospect of relying on it “very frightening,” argued that artists and ordinary people “have no say” in how the technology will remake the world, and said he believes it is “already too late” to stop its advance. His is less a policy position than an existential alarm about a force arriving faster than culture can absorb it.
That unease runs through his recent work: Eddington portrays a community unmoored by screens and machine-mediated reality, and Aster has framed AI as the next accelerant of the disorientation he sees everywhere. He offers no roadmap out — only the warning of a filmmaker who finds the trajectory genuinely terrifying.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/ari-aster