“Because I know the rooster.”

Those were the words of a Baghdad-based director named Hasan Hadi when asked how he was able to corral not just a host of non-actor children for his new movie but a particular kind of junglefowl.

Hadi – his The President’s Cake will come out this fall from Sony Pictures Classics and was just chosen as the official Iraqi Oscar submission – made the comment to a pair of reporters at a dinner at the Toronto International Film Festival. While among the more colorful – and barnyardy – of the remarks uttered at the important early-September gathering, it was far from the only one emphasizing the uniquely human qualities of filmmaking.

Across the Canadian city, directors made statements that, as the algorithm rises, almost take on a political cast. Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke stood in front of an audience and described the painstaking rehearsal for their movie about Lorenz Hart. (“Ethan and I have done our share of dialogue-intensive movies,” Linklater said, “but this was something else.”) Nia DaCosta talked about how her feelings on Ibsen animated her need to redo Hedda Gabler. Paul Greengrass left audiences breathless with his latest neo-verite adventure that has Matthew McConaughey as an embattled bus driver saving children in the 2018 Paradise wildfires. None of them mentioned AI explicitly. They didn’t have to. Their pro-human vehemence was evident in every quote and frame.

One filmmaker who did mention AI did so with stridency. Guillermo del Toro, whose Pinocchio was conceived as an ode to the human over the machine, was emphatic on the subject. “[We live in] a world that now wants to tell us loud and clear that art is not important; they want to insist it can be done by an app, that it can be done by anyone,” he said at the TIFF gala, where he received an award. “We cannot allow that to happen.”

But a different, more computer-enabled vision of Hollywood was also playing out at the industry’s big convocation, as tech entrepreneurs pitched their own vision to the entertainment decisionmakers. People from Largo, which builds models to test movies using virtual audiences. Gennie, which uses Google’s VEO-3 to help documentarians create re-enactment footage with the push of a button. And Luma AI, whose executives believe studios can deploy their video-generation tool to ramp up production (and ramp down sets); its chief executive laid out a vision at THR’s Access Canada Summit in which studios could survive only by producing 1,000 movies every year with a massive assist from AI.

All of them were at TIFF too, trying to enact their own vision of the entertainment future. And while they rarely crossed paths with the humanists, they clashed with them ideologically just the same. Hollywood may only be big enough for one them.

Pull the camera back and you’ll suddenly see the same battle playing out everywhere, in boardrooms and courtrooms. Warner Bros. has just sued Midjourney, making similar allegations as Disney and Universal before it against the image-generation startup. Anthropic has just agreed to settle with three authors who sued the AI company for training its models on their books. If the settlement is approved, it could result in the company paying a total of $1.5 billion to hundreds of thousands of authors – but the judge in the case also cleared the way for tech companies to engage in such training without permission so long as they bought retail copies of the books.

Seeking to convey the stakes, two activists, Guido Reichstadter and Michael Trazzi, have gone on hunger strikes outside the San Francisco office of Anthropic and London office of Google’s DeepMind respectively. They say they won’t eat any food until the companies stop developing all new AI models, giving both a visual and historical dimension to the conflict.

Meanwhile, the startup Showrunner, with investment from Amazon, made waves when it said it would use AI for an internal experiment to restore some 43 minutes of lost footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. The announcement generated a backlash from the company managing Welles’ estate, which an official there calling the move a “purely mechanical exercise” that lacked “uniquely innovative thinking.”

And of course The Sphere just opened an AI-enabled re-formatted The Wizard of Oz, aided by Google and $80 million (a budget $15 million higher than the original’s in 2025 dollars). While eliciting rave reviews, the project also added in cameos for the CEOs David Zaslav and James Dolan who were not, according to most film historians, present on the 1939 MGM set.

After years of companies building tech and raising money, the introduction of AI into the house of storytelling is finally here. And media players need to decide whether they want to make up the guest bedroom.

It would also be a mistake to think AI will only be used on classic films – on films with few stakeholders. The tools pitched and implemented would be used to create what was once done by hand on sets and in marketing departments, automating the analogue, with all the labor and cultural consequences to go with it.

At a hearing for the Anthropic settlement, one of the author plaintiffs, Kirk Wallace Johnson, said he saw the proceeding as the “beginning of a fight on behalf of humans that don’t believe we have to sacrifice everything on the altar of AI.” Johnson is the author of The Feather Thief, a critically acclaimed 2018 true-crime book about a heist that made off with scores of centuries-old historical bird skins. You could say that he, too, knows the rooster.

This story appeared in the Sept. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.