George Lucas
Filmmaker
Creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, founder of Industrial Light & Magic, and the man who dragged Hollywood into the digital age. At 82 he shrugs off AI resistance as horse-and-buggy nostalgia: “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
In his words
There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.
It’s very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’
Biography
George Lucas (born 1944) created Star Wars and Indiana Jones, founded Lucasfilm, THX, and LucasArts, and built Industrial Light & Magic — the effects house that has defined what movies can show for fifty years. A father of the modern blockbuster, he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 for around $4 billion, making him one of the wealthiest filmmakers who has ever lived.
No director has spent more of his career betting on the next tool. ILM invented modern visual effects; his companies pioneered digital editing, digital sound, and digital projection; Pixar began life as his computer division; and 2002’s Attack of the Clones was the first major feature shot entirely on digital cameras — each move denounced as heresy at the time, each now simply how movies are made. His embrace of AI is the latest entry in that lineage, not a departure from it.
“That’s progress, it’s the future”
In a July 2026 conversation with the film magazine A Rabbit’s Foot, reported by the Guardian, the 82-year-old likened AI sceptics to Luddites clinging to horses and carts — and delivered the analogy with the patience of a man who has watched this exact argument lose every previous round.
It’s very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’
There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.
The case he makes is practical, not utopian. “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he told the magazine — and he even turns the technology’s biggest anxiety back on itself, arguing that AI is the answer to AI fakery.
If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that. Humans can’t, we’re not that smart.
The timing gave the comments extra bite: they landed the same week Christopher Nolan dismissed “AI slop” and declared Gen Z was rejecting the technology — a clean schism between the two most technically influential filmmakers of their generations, with the man who built Hollywood’s digital toolkit standing firmly on the other side.
Gallery
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/george-lucas