Phil Lord & Chris Miller
Directors & Producers
The filmmaking duo behind the Spider-Verse films, The Lego Movie, and the Jump Street comedies. They have vowed there is “no generative AI” in the Spider-Verse trilogy — “and there never will be.”
Why this score
How the formula works →- +4.9antiVows never to use AI
- +2.0anti2 anti-AI statements (forceful)
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 · 6.9/10
In their words
There is no generative AI in Beyond the Spider-Verse and there never will be. One of the main goals of the films is to create new visual styles that have never been seen in a studio CG film, not steal the generic plagiarized average of other artists’ work.
One of the reasons we’re out pushing so hard on these projects is it’s important for people to see how good things can be when they’re not written by a computer.
Biography
Phil Lord (born 1975) and Christopher Miller (born 1975) are an American writer-director-producer team who have worked together since college. Their credits include Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, and — as producers and writers — the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel Across the Spider-Verse, films celebrated for inventing entirely new animation styles.
No AI in the Spider-Verse
When speculation swirled online that the visually dense Spider-Verse films might rely on generative AI, Miller shut it down flatly. “There is no generative AI in ‘Beyond the Spider-Verse’ and there never will be,” he posted in June 2024, correcting the record on behalf of the partnership.
His reasoning cut to the artistic core of the project. The whole ambition of the trilogy, he explained, is “to create new visual styles that have never been seen in a studio CG film” — the opposite of what generative models do, which he characterised as producing “the generic plagiarized average of other artists’ work.” For a duo whose brand is invention, AI’s tendency toward the statistical mean is not just unwelcome; it is antithetical.
The Spider-Verse films are famous for their hand-touched, comic-book-style frames and a small army of animators, and the no-AI pledge reads as a defence of that labour-intensive, human-authored aesthetic.
Quote sources
- Chris Miller on X, 2024(x.com)
- Phil Lord — The Hollywood Reporter, 2023(hollywoodreporter.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/lord-and-miller
