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.
In their words
I’d rather die.
Why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa and say you made it?
Biography
Guillermo del Toro (born 1964) is a Mexican filmmaker, novelist, and lifelong monster-maker whose work — Pan’s Labyrinth, the Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water, and the Academy Award-winning stop-motion Pinocchio — fuses fairy-tale wonder with the beautifully grotesque. Across three Academy Awards he has become one of cinema’s most cherished advocates for craft and the human hand. In 2025 he emerged as one of the film world’s most outspoken critics of generative AI, framing the fight as one for the soul of art itself.
AI, particularly generative AI — I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I’m 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak.
For del Toro the objection is not practical but spiritual: he locates the value of art in human authorship, and sees machine generation as a counterfeit of that act.
I think that art is an expression of the soul… I consume, and love, art made by humans. I am not interested in an illustration made by machines and the extrapolation of information.
There is an irony worth sitting with, though. Del Toro is himself a pioneer of digital creature work; his films marry practical effects with extensive computer-generated imagery, and many of the monsters audiences adore are rendered by machines running algorithms over enormous amounts of data. The line he draws between “art made by humans” and “an illustration made by machines” already runs straight through his own toolkit — where the machines have always been instruments in human hands.
Where they stand in the war
Who opposes them
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.
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.”
Gareth Edwards
Director
British director of Rogue One, Godzilla, and The Creator who built his career making blockbuster-scale films with tiny crews and lean budgets. A visual-effects artist by training, he sees AI as a tool that could rank alongside the camera — and outdo CGI.
James Cameron
Director
Director of The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, and Avatar, and one of cinema’s great technological pioneers. In 2024 he joined the board of Stability AI, calling the convergence of generative AI and CGI “the next wave” — while arguing it should speed up and empower artists, not replace them.
Martin Scorsese
Director
One of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, and a lifelong champion of film preservation. In 2026 he became an advisor to Black Forest Labs and spoke openly about using AI-generated storyboards in pre-production — framing AI as another tool for communicating a director’s vision, not a replacement for artists.
Steven Soderbergh
Director
Oscar-winning director and one of cinema’s most relentless technical experimenters, known for shooting and cutting his own films and embracing every new format from prosumer digital to the iPhone. He treats generative AI as just the latest tool worth getting his hands on.
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