Nolan calls AI replacing humans 'nonsense'
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Christopher Nolan told AFP in Paris that AI is a technology 'successfully adopted by Wall Street and by investors and by tech companies that the public has so thoroughly rejected,' noting young people in particular coined the dismissive term 'AI slop.'
- Nolan dismissed the idea AI will 'replace human beings wholesale and human creativity' as 'nonsense,' though he said he expects the technology to yield useful 'imaging tools.'
- Nolan's new film, a $250m adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey starring Matt Damon as Odysseus alongside Zendaya, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson and Anne Hathaway, opens in cinemas this week after filming across Mediterranean locations.
- Nolan drew parallels in a 2023 Guardian interview between J. Robert Oppenheimer's nuclear-restraint advocacy and AI experts like Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google to warn publicly of the technology's 'existential risk.'
- Industry fears that AI could replace actors, writers and camera operators were among the issues behind the 2023 Hollywood strike that shuttered productions and cost studios billions of dollars.
- Nolan has been attacked by Elon Musk and other rightwing figures over his casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy; Nolan told the Telegraph the backlash 'comes with the territory' and that pre-release criticism is always 'irrelevant.'
Why it matters: Coming from a director whose studios bankrolled a $250m production, Nolan's public dismissal of AI-replacement fears carries weight in an industry that just ground to a halt in 2023 partly over those exact concerns, reinforcing the 'human creativity' camp at the top of the budget ladder.
