George Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts

The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.

Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”

Resistance to the technology, he said, was “very much like sitting here saying: ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’”

Adoption of such tools, continued Lucas, was an inevitability. “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”

Lucas is not the only director of a Star Wars film to have come out in favour of AI. The British film-maker Gareth Edwards, who made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and most recently Jurassic World Rebirth said generative AI “is a fucking genius at helping you”.

However, there are high-profile holdouts, including the director of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan, who recently said: “I’ve never seen a technology that’s been so successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors … that the public has so thoroughly rejected. Young people, in particular, they coined this term ‘AI slop’ … There’s a sort of disdain for things AI.”

Meanwhile, Steven Soderbergh, whose documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview includes AI-generated sequences, has expressed ambivalence. “I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We are in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going: ‘That was a fun phase.’”

Lucas also told the website his thoughts on the industry’s use of audience testing and focus groups. “I don’t like focus groups,” he said. “The audience doesn’t know what they want to see. If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a film-maker I want to find out why. But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie … Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie.”