{"id":399873,"date":"2026-01-10T20:59:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T20:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/399873\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T20:59:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T20:59:20","slug":"how-this-became-the-season-of-hating-on-a-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/399873\/","title":{"rendered":"How This Became the Season of Hating on A.I."},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe moment ricocheted through the Gotham Awards<\/a>. \u201cFuck AI<\/a>,\u201d Guillermo del Toro declared from the stage. And then, just to make sure the room \u2014 and world \u2014 heard him, the Frankenstein director said it again.<\/p>\n

\n\tAvid 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\u2019s backlot boss Matt Remick.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut 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 lead spots in the Oscar race. All of them embrace an almost throwback vibe of granular emotion well outside the realm of machine intelligence.<\/p>\n

\n\tCompare this to the movies of a decade ago, when such nominees as Hidden Figures, Arrival and The Martian all centered on themes of progress. \u201cI\u2019m going to have to science the shit out of this\u201d has become \u201cLet\u2019s remember all the feelings computers can\u2019t approximate.\u201d In fact, the only tech-positive movie in the entire batch of 2026 Oscar frontrunners that I can count is F1, and that\u2019s technology of the piston and tire-tread variety.<\/p>\n

\n\tI asked Elle Fanning, as co-star of Sentimental Value, whether she feels her film stands in response to a coming automation wave. \u201cI think it\u2019s important to have movies like this \u2014 this is what the world needs,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne 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\u2019s Entertainer of Year by citing the tech as \u201can enhancement tool\u201d but then said too much \u201cdissipates into the ether of other internet junk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEven James Cameron, perhaps the most AI-forward of the current crop of contenders (\u201cAnybody that\u2019s a human being is a model \u2026 you\u2019ve got a three and a half pound meat computer [as a brain],\u201d he said in April) has scurried for safety lately (\u201cI\u2019m not negative about generative AI. I just wanted to point out we don\u2019t use it on the Avatar films,\u201d he told Comicbook.com in December). Just the same, if Avatar: Fire and Ash is the first of the franchise\u2019s movies \u2014 and the first Cameron film in more than 30 years \u2014 not to get a best picture nomination, you can point to his amenable stance on AI as one reason why.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, on television, Vince Gilligan dropped a visible \u201cThis show was made by humans\u201d into the closing credits of his new series Pluribus, a small grenade from the famously anti-AI creator.<\/p>\n

\n\tAdvertising has joined the fight too. A recent Polaroid ad noted that \u201cAI can\u2019t generate sand between your toes.\u201d A New York subway campaign for the \u201cFriend\u201d AI companion (\u201csomeone who listens, responds and supports you\u201d) got a counter from Heineken, which took out its own ad saying \u201cthe best way to make a friend is over a beer.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd in a sly anti-AI message, the pet-centric company BARK just released an ad (including on Disney+) that\u2019s directed by a dog, or at least DP\u2019ed by one. An Australian shepherd pit bull mix named Mia wearing a GoPro tears through a family holiday gathering under the tagline \u201cMerry Chaos, Humans.\u201d Good luck getting an algorithm to replicate that.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne reason the matter has gotten so serious is that Gen AI\u2019s descent on the creative world isn\u2019t some far-off possibility. Coca-Cola recently released an ad generated entirely by machines \u2014 studios in Los Angeles nudged it into the world with no human actors. Disney\u2019s Bob Iger announced a $1 billion partnership with OpenAI that allows users to make generative memes on Disney+, further splintering the attention economy \u2014 and Disney\u2019s resources \u2014 from original human-led work. Iger\u2019s accompanying statement that \u201cno human generation has ever stood in the way of technological advance, and we don\u2019t intend to try,\u201d was an over-generalized puzzler and runs awkwardly against Disney\u2019s own Searchlight, whose awards hopeful Is This Thing On? is exactly the kind of lovingly handmade work no slopmonster could manage.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt 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\u2019ll see how that goes once Netflix and its algorithms enter the picture.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is a war coming, and Iger\u2019s and del Toro\u2019s 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 \u2014 shows, incidentally, from Apple, which more than any other company has normalized and cuddlified our current screen addiction. When the guild negotiations happen this year, these broadsides will be just the first shots.<\/p>\n

\n\tOscar speeches can feel pontificating and pointless, a shout into the echo chamber. But they are among the few times creatives hold the world\u2019s attention, or at least the room\u2019s. 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s no way to know if Gen AI\u2019s Hollywood invasion can be slowed; my suspicion is it can\u2019t. But humans getting up to give a heartfelt \u2014 or, better, messy \u2014 thank-you might turn out to be the best reminder of why we should keep them around.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story appeared in the Jan. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The moment ricocheted through the Gotham Awards. \u201cFuck AI,\u201d Guillermo del Toro declared from the stage. And then,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,10546,74],"class_list":["post-399873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-awards","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}