How This Became the Season of Hating on AI

The moment ricocheted through the Gotham Awards. “Fuck AI,” Guillermo del Toro declared from the stage. And then, just to make sure the room — and the world — heard him, the Frankenstein director said it again.

Avid viewers of The Studio will appreciate the callback to a watershed episode this season when Ice Cube, as himself, uttered the same to a room filled with screaming fans, causing a fresh headache for Seth Rogen’s backlot boss Matt Remick.

But one need not be attuned to meta-clever streaming shows to hear the skeptical call recently unleashed. Awards season, Hollywood broadly and even the world is filled with anti-AI stances. Gleefully (or dolefully) human movies like Hamnet, Sentimental Value, Marty Supreme and yes Frankenstein hold leading spots in the Oscar race. All of them embrace an almost throwback vibe of granular emotion well outside the realm of machine intelligence.

Compare this to the movies of a decade ago, when such nominees as Hidden Figures, Arrival and The Martian all centered on themes of progress. “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this” has become “Let’s remember all the feelings computers can’t approximate.” In fact, the only tech-positive movie in the entire batch of 2026 Oscar frontrunners that I can count is F1and that’s technology of the piston and tire-tread variety.

I asked Elle Fanning, as co-star of Sentimental Value, whether she feels her film stands in response to a coming automation wave. “I think it’s important to have movies like this — this is what the world needs,” she said.

One Battle After Another star Leonardo DiCaprio, currently the favorite to win best actor, tossed a few faint flowers at AI in his recent interview as Time’s Entertainer of Year by citing the tech as “an enhancement tool” but then said too much “dissipates into the ether of other internet junk.”

Even James Cameron, perhaps the most AI-forward of the current crop of contenders (“Anybody that’s a human being is a model … you’ve got a three and a half pound meat computer [as a brain],” he said in April) has scurried for safety lately (“I’m not negative about generative AI. I just wanted to point out we don’t use it on the Avatar films,” he told Comicbook.com in December). Just the same, if Avatar: Fire and Ash is the first of the franchise’s movies — and the first Cameron film in more than 30 years — not to get a best picture nomination, you can point to his amenable stance on AI as one reason why.

Meanwhile, on television, Vince Gilligan dropped a visible “This show was made by humans” into the closing credits of his new series Pluribusa small grenade from the famously anti-AI creator.

Advertising has joined the fight too. A recent Polaroid ad noted that “AI can’t generate sand between your toes.” A New York subway campaign for the “Friend” AI companion (“someone who listens, responds and supports you”) got a counter from Heineken, which took out its own ad saying “the best way to make a friend is over a beer.”)

And in a sly anti-AI message, the pet-centric company BARK just released an ad (including on Disney+) that’s directed by a dog, or at least DP’ed by one. An Australian shepherd pit bull mix named Mia wearing a GoPro tears through a family holiday gathering under the tagline “Merry Chaos, Humans.” Good luck getting an algorithm to replicate that.

We’ve come a long way from 2023, when Julia Louis-Dreyfus did a whole award-acceptance bit about how badly ChatGPT would have written her speech (after she joked it confused her with Julia Roberts). No actor would give such a lighthearted talk now, and if they did, no one in the room would laugh.

One reason the matter has gotten so serious is that Gen AI’s descent on the creative world isn’t some far-off possibility. Coca-Cola recently released an ad generated entirely by machines — studios in Los Angeles nudged it into the world with no human actors. Disney’s Bob Iger announced a $1 billion partnership with OpenAI that allows users to make generative memes on Disney+, further splintering the attention economy — and Disney’s resources — from original human-led work. Iger’s accompanying statement that “no human generation has ever stood in the way of technological advance, and we don’t intend to try,” was an over-generalized puzzler and runs awkwardly against Disney’s own Searchlight, whose awards hopeful Is This Thing On? is exactly the kind of lovingly handmade work no slopmonster could manage.

At a recent HBO press event, network chief Casey Bloys tried to hold the line, telling THR that the company would use the tech as a production tool but stay far away from generative AI. We’ll see how that goes once Netflix and its algorithms enter the picture.

There is a war coming, and Iger’s and del Toro’s diametric comments only begin to hint at it. Hollywood suits and Hollywood creatives hold opposite interests, the former trying to make money and limit risk in a post-professional content age, the latter trying to argue financially and spiritually for why that age should never come. The fissure is on full display with those sharp lines in The Studio and Pluribus — shows, incidentally, from Apple, which more than any other company has normalized and cuddled our current screen addiction. When the guild negotiations happen this year, these broadsides will be just the first shots.

Oscar speeches can feel pontificating and pointless, a shout into the echo chamber. But they are among the few times creatives hold the world’s attention, or at least the room’s. Signing the next memeslop deal is a tiny bit harder if the talent that just stood up to salute you is also deriding you for making those pacts.

There’s no way to know if Gen AI’s Hollywood invasion can be slowed; my suspicion is it can’t. But humans getting up to give a heartfelt — or, better, messy — thank-you might turn out to be the best reminder of why we should keep them around.

This story appeared in the Jan. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.