Darren Aronofsky
Director
Academy Award-nominated director of Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Whale, and one of the highest-profile filmmakers building AI into the craft. He founded the AI-focused studio Primordial Soup and partnered with Google DeepMind to develop AI-assisted projects.
In their words
It’s not impersonating a person, it’s actually a tool, and it’s very much in the tradition of the evolution of filmmaking. From when sound was first introduced, there was incredible pushback from all the people playing usable instruments. When the portable camera came, we suddenly got films like Breathless and the French New Wave. When VFX came, that unlocked the superhero film.
Biography
Darren Aronofsky (born 1969) is an American filmmaker known for psychologically intense, formally bold dramas. He broke through with Requiem for a Dream and went on to direct The Wrestler, which won the Golden Lion at Venice, and Black Swan, which earned him a Best Director nomination. His later work includes The Whale, which won Brendan Fraser the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Aronofsky is also among the highest-profile directors investing directly in AI filmmaking infrastructure. He founded the studio Primordial Soup, which signed a partnership with Google DeepMind to develop AI-assisted projects pairing human performers and writers with generative visuals. He frames the technology not as an impersonation of human artistry but as a tool that extends a long lineage of disruptive filmmaking advances — sound, the portable camera, visual effects.
Guillermo del Toro, Leonardo DiCaprio movies at IMAX will always exist, and people will always want to go see those movies, and I will continue to make movies like that. All that type of filmmaking will always exist… it’s not one or the other.
That last point is his core argument: AI filmmaking and traditional cinema are not a zero-sum choice. The handcrafted, big-canvas films he admires — and continues to make — will endure alongside new forms that the tools make possible, much as every prior technical leap widened the medium rather than narrowing it.
Where they stand in the war
The opposition
Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker
Oscar-winning director of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Pinocchio, and one of cinema’s most beloved champions of handcrafted, human-made art. In 2025 he became one of Hollywood’s most quotable opponents of generative AI, saying he would “rather die” than use it.
Kane Parsons
Director
Self-taught filmmaker who created the viral “Backrooms” horror series on YouTube as a teenager and is now directing its feature adaptation. A VFX prodigy, he is sharply critical of generative AI — saying he gets no creative enjoyment from it and would make it “disappear forever” if he could.
Tim Burton
Director
The gothic-whimsical auteur behind Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman. After seeing AI-generated versions of his own Disney character designs, he described the experience as something “sucking” from his soul — likening generative AI to a robot taking your humanity.
Dana Terrace
Animator
Peabody Award-winning animator and creator of Disney Channel’s The Owl House who became one of animation’s most outspoken opponents of generative AI. In 2025 she urged fans to cancel Disney+ and pirate her own show in protest of the studio’s embrace of AI-generated content.
The Indie Game Awards
Awards Ceremony
An annual indie-focused awards show produced by the team behind Six One Indie. It enforces a blanket ban on generative AI — a policy that, at its December 2025 ceremony, led it to strip Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 of its Game of the Year win hours after handing it out.
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/darren-aronofsky