George Lucas Likens AI Skeptics to Horse-and-Buggy Holdouts
SkimNews Take
Lucas's "horse and buggy" framing recasts an unresolved ethical debate as a settled logistics question, leaving concerns about authorship and displacement outside the frame he sets.
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- George Lucas, 82, compared AI resistance to "sitting here saying... the horse and buggy is really where it's at," arguing cars will "pretty soon... be making them into tanks, and then they'll be killing people. It's terrible"
- Lucas called AI "much easier for us to make movies" and said adoption is unavoidable: "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress, it's the future"
- Lucas made the comments in an interview with the filmmaking publication A Rabbit's Foot
- Christopher Nolan, director of The Odyssey, publicly opposed AI adoption, noting that "young people... coined this term 'AI slop'" and expressing "disdain for things AI" — a stance that directly contradicts Lucas's embrace
- Gareth Edwards, director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Jurassic World Rebirth, called generative AI "a fucking genius at helping you"
- Steven Soderbergh, whose documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview uses AI-generated sequences, split the difference: "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"
- Lucas also used the same interview to rail against focus groups, saying studios hear "the wrong message" and that letting fans make the movie "isn't how you make the movie"
Why it matters: Lucas's endorsement from the creator of Star Wars deepens a public director-level split — Nolan said young people coined 'AI slop' with 'disdain for things AI,' while Lucas and Edwards call adoption inevitable. Studios navigating tooling decisions on tentpole productions now face two opposing stances from directors whose work defines the modern blockbuster.
