Daniel Kwan
Filmmaker
Half of the Oscar-winning duo Daniels, behind Everything Everywhere All at Once. He spent three years producing The AI Doc, co-founded the Creators Coalition on AI, and says he is terrified of the technology while refusing to preach against using it.
Why this score
How the formula works →- 22%nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
- 18%nuancedCampaigns for AI safety rules
- 18%nuancedSupports AI only with conditions
- 18%nuancedFears big tech will monopolize AI
- 16%anti4 anti-AI statements (forceful)
Includes the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field. Evidence splits 8% pro, 16% anti, 76% direction-free → Nuanced
In his words
We’re not saying don’t use A.I. — I don’t believe in dogmas.
Honestly, I’m sick of talking about AI. Who else is sick of talking about AI? I don’t want to just be negative because this technology is both good and bad at the same time. Just like any other technology, every tool can be used for good and for bad. You can build things and break things with the same tool. The problem is with human nature, and entropy, in general. Oftentimes, building things is much harder than breaking things and, right now, the breaking things is much easier.
I’ve been thinking a lot about 2016 because of that trend right now. By the way, don’t do that. They’re using that to train their machines on you to show how people age. Stop it, stop posting stuff, OK? Just be careful, OK? Be careful with these things.
Biography
Daniel Kwan (born 1988) is one half of Daniels, the directing partnership he formed with Daniel Scheinert at Emerson College. After a run of music videos — Foster the People’s “Houdini,” DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” — they made Swiss Army Man (2016) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for the pair.
“Really terrified” — SXSW 2024
Kwan went public on AI at the Daniels’ SXSW keynote in March 2024, a year after the Oscars. He described an industry sprinting to adopt the technology out of fear of being left behind — “because you know you’re next” — and gave a warning that was equal parts awe and dread.
It’s magic, it’s going to solve cancer and bring solutions, it’s a powerful thing, but I’m really terrified of this new story.
In the same talk he refused the obvious next step. He was not telling anyone to abstain, he said, because he did not believe in dogmas — AI was here and would be rapidly deployed across every part of life. That combination, alarm without prohibition, has been his consistent position ever since.
The AI Doc and the Creators Coalition
In the week after the 2023 Oscars, Kwan says, people from Silicon Valley began contacting him to say the technology was moving faster than the public understood. Three years later that turned into The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Kwan, Scheinert and Jonathan Wang, which premiered at Sundance in January 2026 and was released by Focus Features that March. Kwan has been unsentimental about the experience, telling a Sundance panel that he regretted saying yes to the project roughly every other month.
The one thing that we all have to agree on is that this technology is incompatible with our current systems, our current institutions, our current labor laws. It carves a bunch of lines through all these walls that we’ve put up over the last 100 years.
The documentary was also the seed of an organization. In December 2025, eighteen entertainment-industry figures launched the Creators Coalition on AI, with Kwan among the founders alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natasha Lyonne and former Academy president Janet Yang; Gordon-Levitt has credited Kwan with sparking the idea. The group explicitly says its quarrel is not with generative AI as a technology but with unethical AI business practices, and its stated principles are transparency, consent, control and compensation. Kwan told The Hollywood Reporter that Disney’s licensing deal with OpenAI left many in the industry feeling “completely blindsided.”
My fear is that if the film industry, not just Hollywood, but YouTubers, influencers, if we’re not careful, if we don’t come together to set the terms of our industry, the tech industry is going to set the terms for us. They’re slowly going to siphon up everything until they hold the keys for our industry.
Apocaloptimism
Kwan’s framing is neither doom nor boosterism. On a SXSW 2026 panel he argued that filmmakers have to grieve the future they assumed they were getting before they can build a new one, that the only dividing line that matters is between people willing to work together and people who are not, and that the useful goal is arming audiences with how to think about AI rather than what to think. He has been just as pointed about the mundane end of it, warning a Sundance crowd off a viral trend of posting decade-old photos on the grounds that it was free training data for age-progression models.
Quote sources
- SXSW keynote — Deadline, 2024(deadline.com)
- Deadline, 2026(deadline.com)
- The Hollywood Reporter, 2026(hollywoodreporter.com)
Sources & further reading
- Deadline: ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Filmmaker Daniel Kwan “Really Terrified” Of AI – SXSW (2024)
- The Hollywood Reporter: Daniel Kwan Calls for Coordinated Industry Response to AI (2026)
- Deadline: Daniel Kwan On 2016 Photo Posting Trend — “Don’t Do That!” (2026)
- Los Angeles Times: Hollywood stars launch Creators Coalition on AI (2025)
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/daniel-kwan
