James Gurney
Artist & Author
Painter and author best known for Dinotopia, his best-selling illustrated world of humans and intelligent dinosaurs. A traditional plein-air craftsman, he holds one of the most careful, balanced positions in the whole debate: genuinely inspired by what generative AI can do, yet clear-eyed and unflinching about its harms.
In their words
I’m truly inspired by the results other people are getting with the help of generative models. The people who consistently get the best results often have a computer coding background as well as an aesthetic sense. Is it “art?” Sure, why not? It definitely stimulates my imagination and the good stuff strikes me as original.
Biography
James Gurney (born 1958) is an American artist and author best known for Dinotopia — his lavishly painted, best-selling book series imagining a lost island where shipwrecked humans and intelligent dinosaurs build a shared civilization. The books became a publishing phenomenon and made him one of the most recognizable fantasy illustrators of his generation. He paints prolifically from life, shares his craft through the long-running Gurney Journey blog, and is also the author of the art-instruction books Color and Light and Imaginative Realism.
That pedigree — oils, sketchbooks, painting from life — is exactly why his openness to generative AI is notable. Far from dismissing it, Gurney engages with it as a curious craftsman: studying who gets the best results, crediting the blend of coding and aesthetic judgment behind the strongest work, and finding genuine originality in the output.
There’s a lot of good about generative AI in art. For one thing, there has been a huge surge in appreciation for surrealism and fantasy, because that’s what it does best. I’ve seen a lot of images that are new and exciting. The potentials of the medium are almost limitless. But it’s also scary and threatening, especially to digital artists who are part of corporate entertainment pipelines, such as concept artists.
His stance is strikingly careful — neither booster nor doomer. Gurney sits close to the center of this debate and seems to belong there on purpose: he celebrates the creative surge AI has unleashed while naming, in the same breath, its real harms — the threat to working concept artists, the disruption of whole pipelines. He does not hate the technology, and he refuses to pretend its costs away. It is the measured, generous assessment of someone wise enough to hold both truths at once.
Where they stand in the war
The opposition
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.
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.
Ronny Chieng
Comedian
Malaysian-born comedian, actor, and senior Daily Show correspondent. In his 2026 Harvard Class Day address he turned a furious, profane riff against generative AI into a rallying cry, telling the graduating class that destroying AI is the mission of their generation.
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.
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.
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/james-gurney