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 — and in 2026 he barred it outright from the 20th-anniversary 3D re-release of Pan’s Labyrinth.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +4.1antiVows never to use AI
- +3.3anti5 anti-AI statements (fervent)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Anti-AI · 7.4/10
In his words
Absolutely no goddamn AI.
I’d rather die.
Otherwise, 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. 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.”
I think that art is an expression of the soul. At its best, it is encompassing everything you are. Therefore, I consume, and love, art made by humans.
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.
We are on the verge of image illiteracy. We are on the verge of cinema illiteracy.
“No goddamn AI” in Pan’s Labyrinth
The principle now governs his own catalogue. Announcing the 20th-anniversary theatrical return of Pan’s Labyrinth at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2026 — back in cinemas October 9 in 3D and HDR for the first time — del Toro said his one rule for the conversion was “absolutely no goddamn AI,” a line that drew applause from the hall. Faced with the choice of doing the 3D conversion quick or doing it good, he said, “I chose good. You have to put in time. You have to do every element by hand. A human made a decision of depth.”
What we’re protecting is the beauty and the redeeming power of art. It’s not about who gets the job. We are protecting a lineage of art. If we cut a generation of people from learning their craft, you’re cutting the rest of the history of that medium away from them for what?
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.
Gallery
Quote sources
Sources & further reading
- NPR: Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro says “I’d rather die” than use generative AI (2025)
- The Hollywood Reporter: Guillermo del Toro Talks AI — “I’m Worried About Natural Stupidity” (2023)
- Variety: Guillermo del Toro Slams AI Animation — “Insult to Life Itself” (2022)
- Variety: Guillermo del Toro Sounds Alarm on AI and Threats to Creative Freedom (2026)
- Variety: Guillermo del Toro Says There Is “Absolutely No Goddamn AI” in Pan’s Labyrinth 3D Re-Release (2026)
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/guillermo-del-toro
