Spike Lee

Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee (born 1957) has spent forty years making the most argumentative films in American cinema. She’s Gotta Have It announced him in 1986; Do the Right Thing (1989) remains the defining film about race and a New York summer; Malcolm X, 25th Hour, Inside Man, and BlacKkKlansman followed, the last finally winning him a competitive Oscar in 2019 after an honorary one in 2016. He is also a teacher — a tenured professor in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he took his own MFA in 1982 and has taught since 1993 — and a lifelong evangelist for craft learned the hard way.

Bigger than cinema

Lee first went on the record about AI during the 2023 strike summer. Onstage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco that September, in a panel with Viola Davis moderated by MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, he was asked about AI in art and answered with a one-liner about the last technology he distrusted: “I don’t even like autotune.” A few weeks later, at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect summit in New York, an interviewer asked whether it was fair to call him sceptical of AI; per People Management’s account he waved the word away as far too mild, said he did not want studios writing screenplays, argued that machines have no “ownership” of what they produce, and described himself as opposed to their use in art.

His fullest statement came in May 2024, in a joint Hollywood Reporter interview with Giancarlo Esposito — a collaborator since School Daze and Do the Right Thing — tied to a Fiat campaign the two had made together. Asked what threat AI posed to the industry, Lee rejected the framing of the question and enlarged it.

The credit to Steven Spielberg is characteristic: Lee dates his own awareness of the technology to the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which Spielberg completed from Stanley Kubrick’s decades-long development. “He had a crystal ball on that,” Lee told the room. The teaching side of his life has since become its own quiet data point. In April 2026, NYU Tisch struck a deal with Runway to hand free AI credits and training to students across the Hypercinema Lab, ITP and ITM — but, as The Hollywood Reporter noted, the mainline graduate film program where Lee teaches was not part of the agreement.