{"id":376402,"date":"2026-04-01T11:54:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T11:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/376402\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T11:54:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T11:54:12","slug":"former-lucasfilm-chief-kathleen-kennedy-questions-ai-in-filmmaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/376402\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Lucasfilm Chief Kathleen Kennedy Questions AI in Filmmaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOver her more than four decades in in the film business, Kathleen Kennedy<\/a> has been at the vanguard of tech, whether via her work on the\u00a0Star Wars<\/a>\u00a0universe or all those Steven Spielberg ones.\u00a0Jurassic Park\u00a0alone makes you a pioneer.<\/p>\n

You might\u00a0expect the\u00a0uber-veteran, then, to be similarly enthused about AI<\/a> in filmmaking. But Kennedy sounded a more skeptical note Tuesday \u2014 even while speaking to an AI founder at an event he hosted.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTaste is so fundamental to the process of creating things,\u201d she said, in an on-stage conversation with Runway co-funder Crist\u00f3bal\u00a0Valenzuela as part of an AI summit that the New York-based startup hosted in Manhattan Tuesday.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s life experiences; it\u2019s educational. The best directors of films and photography came out of art, they studied art,\u201d she said. She suggested AI-driven films by definition couldn\u2019t have that experience.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKathleeen Kennedy and Cristobal Valenzuela at the Runway AI<\/a> Summit on Tuesday March 31, 2026. Kennedy has some thoughts about AI. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSteven Zeitchik<\/p>\n

\n\tThe event saw a litany of high profile personalities talk about the promise of AI in cinema, a cause Runway has dedicated itself to pursuing. Valenzuela gave a keynote titled \u201cnormalizing magic\u201d to a packed ballroom of hundreds, and executives from Adobe, Promise AI and Paramount all hailed the artistic potential of the tech with thoughts like\u00a0\u201cHuman creativity will 1775044452 not be constrained by time,\u201d (Adobe\u2019sVP of GenAI New Business Ventures Hannah Elsakr).<\/p>\n

Kennedy, who left her role<\/a> as head of Lucasfilm in January, didn\u2019t entirely dismiss the technology, saying it could help for the kind of nuts-and-bolts tasks that nearly everyone agrees it could be useful for \u2014\u00a0
\u201cpreviz, planning, budgeting, scheduling.\u201d But this was faint praise as she questioned more sweeping applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you get into execution,\u201d she said, a model could falter at the essence of filmmaking. \u201cWhat are you trying to do? What\u2019s the painting you\u2019re trying to create?\u201d Kennedy said. \u201cThere\u2019s [beautiful] unpredictability in the creative process that\u2019s going to be tricky to preserve because AI is so predictable.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one point she also stood up for the Hollywood creative community, leveling a charge, if mutedly, against parts of the tech world for how it was carrying forth the AI movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think what\u2019s missing in the discussion right now is transparency,\u201d she said, \u201cI think people [in Hollywood] feel that there\u2019s a lot they don\u2019t know about what\u2019s going on. When there\u2019s conversation around how these language models are being trained, for instance\u2026.\u00a0I think if we can reach a point where there\u2019s more transparency in those discussions \u2014\u00a0 and, frankly, more transparency, consequently, in people using these tools,\u201d she added, \u201cthen I think that will help greatly to dissipate [the distrust].\u201d<\/p>\n

Valenzuela mostly deferred to Kennedy and did not challenge her, even as the AI community of which he\u2019s a part believes there has been transparency and largely sees AI-skeptic filmmakers as hyper-traditionalists who need to get on board. He sometimes did bring up popular counterpoints, such as the idea that AI tools will lower the barrier to entry for filmmakers.<\/p>\n

Companies like Runway see themselves as a bridge between the Silicon Valley hypesters and Hollywood skeptics, catering to filmmakers with tools and eschewing social applications like ByteDance\u2019s Seesaw (The Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise fight people).<\/p>\n

Kennedy did embrace some potentially novel use cases of AI in filmmaking, like getting simulated opinions from a host of actors on a script without needing to pry it from them (the idea would be to get new points of view on material). She also said that, thanks to AI, \u201cwe are on the precipice of something that might look and feel quite different than a two-hour movie experience\u2026or television,\u201d likely in short-form.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut she largely seemed wary of integrating AI into the filmmaking process, even raising an eyebrow at 3D printing, saying that it didn\u2019t create props as durable as those made by conventional human means.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe interesting thing that happened with the props is that after about take 3 many of them started to break, and we realized that when so many things we do are hand-done, then the materials that are used and choices that are made\u2026was something decided by a human being. And when we were doing this with the new technology, we didn\u2019t have the benefit of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s most philosophical response to the AI camp came when she described the value of human experience in film.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m going to sound like a traditionalist,\u201d she said, \u201cbut I have a deep appreciation for learned experiences that then contribute to the collaboration and the creative process. And it\u2019s just like when we\u2019re working with a composer, if you know that somebody\u2019s classically trained, but they\u2019re still doing a very modern rock-and-roll type score, you\u2019re just going to get a depth to the decisionmaking along the way that I think is really valuable.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tDitto, she said, with lighting.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s one of the trickier tools in art because it permeates everything we do,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd you need to see many examples in order to do it the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over her more than four decades in in the film business, Kathleen Kennedy has been at the vanguard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,168671,218,219,61,60,126767,1545,168672,2140,80],"class_list":["post-376402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-filmmaking","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kathleen-kennedy","tag-large-language-models","tag-runway-ai","tag-star-wars","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}