Paul Feig
Director
Creator of Freaks and Geeks and director of Bridesmaids, Spy, and The Housemaid. He calls generative AI “technology literally none of us asked for” and signed the Human Artistry Campaign’s anti-training-theft letter.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.0antiSigned an anti-AI letter
- +2.4antiCalls AI overhyped
- +2.4anti4 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 · 7.8/10
In his words
I’m here to try and bring us some kind of reassurance, because AI is not us. It’s not who we are. It’s who we were years ago, months ago, days ago, hours ago, minutes ago. All AI can do is take what we’ve done, and log in, and scrape it, mix, match it, and turn it into something that seems original, but it’s not original. It’s our old ideas. It’s our old experiences. It’s the things that we said, and wrote, and lived through already.
AI was in our past. We live in our present, and we will live in our future. And all AI can do is follow and try to sound and be like us. But it will never be us. It can only be an amalgamation of what we leave behind.
Biography
Paul Feig (born September 17, 1962) is an American writer, director, producer, and actor whose career runs from the beloved one-season high-school series Freaks and Geeks — which he created in 1999 — through a run of studio comedies including Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, and A Simple Favor. He directed episodes of The Office, Mad Men, 30 Rock, and Arrested Development along the way, and returned to features with the Lionsgate thriller The Housemaid in 2025.
Feig runs his own company, Feigco Entertainment, and has spent much of the last decade building pipelines for women and underrepresented directors through the Powderkeg incubator. That producer’s-eye view of the business — who gets hired, who gets paid — shapes how he talks about generative AI: less as an aesthetic threat than as a cost-cutting instrument aimed at the people he employs.
“We are HI”
In February 2026, Deadline reported that Feig had put his name to “Stealing Isn’t Innovation,” the Human Artistry Campaign initiative in which more than a thousand creatives accused tech companies of theft and demanded ethical, consented partnerships for access to copyrighted work. He joined a roster that already included Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, Sean Astin, and Fran Drescher.
Today, a lot of us of the storytelling business are being confronted by a rather terrifying technological development: AI. Now, I have my own personal thoughts about this, namely, that it’s technology literally none of us asked for, but one that billionaires are investing huge amounts of money in to reduce their workforce and raise their profits.
Four months later, accepting a career achievement award at the Nantucket Film Festival in June 2026, he turned an acceptance speech into a manifesto. Feig was careful to say he was not there to peddle doom: his argument was that a model trained on the past can only ever recombine the past, while human beings keep changing. The speech drew loud cheers from the room, and its coinage — HI, human intelligence — travelled further than the speech itself.
Keep moving forward, keep experiencing life, love, and friendship, and challenges, and joy, and sadness, and all the things that have brought us to where we are, because we are not AI. We are not artificial intelligence, we are HI. We are human intelligence.
Feig’s objection is really two objections braided together. One is economic — that the capital flooding into AI is aimed at shrinking payrolls, not enlarging art. The other is a claim about capability: that models are derivative by construction and cannot originate. The second is the more contestable half, and it is the one that will be tested fastest.
Quote sources
- Deadline, 2026(deadline.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/paul-feig
