Guillermo del Toro

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.

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. He has held that line since the earliest days of the image generators — telling Decider in December 2022, while promoting his handmade Pinocchio, that he consumes and loves art made by humans, and echoing Hayao Miyazaki’s famous verdict that AI-generated animation is “an insult to life itself.”

Frankenstein and the tech bros

His 2025 Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein sharpened the argument into allegory: del Toro told NPR he deliberately gave Victor Frankenstein “the arrogance of the tech bros” — a creator blind to consequences — and said his real worry is “not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity.” Accepting a BFI Fellowship at a Hollywood dinner in June 2026, he escalated the warning, telling the industry crowd that the sanctity of the image itself is now at stake.

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.