David Lynch
Director
The surrealist auteur behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, whose dreamlike style gave us the word “Lynchian.” In one of his final interviews, months before his death in January 2025, he called AI “fantastic” and “incredible as a tool for creativity.”
In their words
I think it’s fantastic. I know a lot of people are afraid of it. I’m sure, like everything, they say it’ll be used for good or for bad. I think it’d be incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity. The good side of it’s important for moving forward in a beautiful way.
Biography
David Lynch (1946–2025) was one of cinema’s most singular artists — the surrealist mind behind Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, work so distinctive it gave the language a new adjective: “Lynchian.” A painter, musician, and devoted advocate of Transcendental Meditation, he was also, contrary to his mystic reputation, an early embracer of new tools — abandoning celluloid for digital video well before most of his peers.
That openness extended to artificial intelligence. In a November 2024 interview with Sight and Sound — one of his last, given just two months before he died in January 2025 — Lynch was asked about AI and answered with characteristic directness, calling it “fantastic” and imagining it as a genuine aid to human creativity rather than a threat to it.
It is a quietly remarkable position from an artist so associated with the handmade and the intuitive. Lynch did not pretend the technology was without peril — he acknowledged it could be used “for good or for bad” — but his instinct was hope: that, used well, the machine could help rather than hollow out the act of making.
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/david-lynch