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.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.6anti2 anti-AI statements (forceful)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Firmly Anti-AI · 3.6/10
In his words
I have a lot of fear regarding this. It’s obviously already too late. We’re in a race now. It’s how the history of technological innovation has worked: If we can, we will.
The weirder things get, and the longer we live in them, the more normal they become. But something huge is happening right now, and we have no say in it. So, here we go.
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.
Quote sources
- IndieWire, 2025(indiewire.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/ari-aster
