Celine Song
Filmmaker and Playwright
Korean-Canadian writer-director of Past Lives and Materialists. On a Marrakech jury stage in November 2025 she borrowed Guillermo del Toro’s two-word verdict on AI and spent several minutes explaining why she meant it — that the technology is “colonizing our minds” and encroaching on what makes living worth doing.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +4.2antiProfesses hatred of AI
- +3.1anti4 anti-AI statements (fervent)
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: Strongly Anti-AI · 7.3/10
In her words
To quote Guillermo del Toro, who will be here at this festival, “Fuck AI”… the way that it is completely destroyed the planet… the way that it is completely colonizing our minds in the way that we encounter images and sound, I’m very concerned about it.
Biography
Celine Song (born 19 September 1988 in South Korea, raised in Canada) is a playwright turned filmmaker whose first feature, Past Lives (2023), earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Her stage work includes Endlings and a live production of Chekhov’s The Seagull performed entirely inside The Sims 4 — a reminder that she is not a technophobe by temperament. Her second film, Materialists, opened in 2025.
“Fuck AI”
Song sat on the 2025 Marrakech International Film Festival jury under president Bong Joon-ho. At the jury press conference on 29 November 2025, asked about the rise of AI, she gave the longest and most sustained answer on the panel — opening by explicitly endorsing Guillermo del Toro’s blunt formulation, then building an argument underneath it about energy use, image culture, and the erosion of difficulty in human life.
The thing I’m actually more worried about than anything is the way that it is trying to encroach on what makes our lives very, very beautiful and very, very hard, and what makes living worth doing.
Her most specific objection was about collaboration rather than output. Cinematography, she argued, is not a stock of images that can be retrieved on demand; it is what she gets from working with a particular human being who has lived a particular life. She invoked the TV series Severance as “one of the best documents about the way that AI is completely taking over what is beautifully difficult about human life,” and closed the answer by repeating del Toro’s phrase in her own voice.
The images that I make with my cinematographer is what I get by having his entire life’s work and his entire existence as a human being — the difficulties, the failures, everything… so deeply and… not very respectfully, fuck AI.
The panel became one of the most-quoted AI moments of the 2025 festival circuit: Bong joked about raising “a military squad” to destroy AI servers, and Jenna Ortega said the industry had “opened up a Pandora’s box.” Song has not, so far as the public record shows, filed suit, signed a petition, or made an AI-free pledge about her own productions — her opposition is argued rather than organized.
Quote sources
- Deadline, 2025(deadline.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/celine-song
