George Lucas has recently come under fire for recent statements suggesting that he is in favor of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the makings of future films. However, his statements may not be as pro-AI as they initially appear.
While speaking to A Rabbit’s Foot about a variety of topics ahead of the opening of his museum, George Lucas weighed in on the topic of artificial intelligence, having something of a defeatist approach toward AI tools in the filmmaking space:
“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies. It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Naturally, like many times he has spoken, Lucas’s comments have driven ire from others. AI has been a very controversial subject in the past few years due to associations with both Generative AI (AI that generates “original” content that is scrubbed from multiple online sources) and Agentic AI (AI that acts as a user, or agent, based on the data that is input into it, which creates behavioral patterns for it to follow).
Both Generative AI (GenAI) and Agentic AI (AgenAI) are almost universally disliked on social media due to several factors, such as the fact that much of this data is effectively plagiarized from a massive variety of sources, there is a negative environmental impact for using these specific forms of AI on the scale that corporations funding them want, energy prices and general costs on anything are inflated as a result of the increase in energy consumption needed to run these programs on such a large scale, and their efficiency in actually replacing human workers is massively overstated while still eliminating human jobs.
That being said, many of the tools that Lucas are referring to are not strictly GenAI or AgenAI – many are tied to ideas like machine learning, in which a computer learns patterns of how to artificially code based on the human inputs of a programmer. Unlike GenAI or AgenAI, these are widely considered ethical by comparison, do not cost anyone jobs, and do not cause any significant environmental damage.
To capitalize on earlier overall trends with GenAI and AgenAI, many of these existing tools were called “AI” in an attempt to appease shareholders, but companies have since distanced themselves from that approach in response to widespread backlash to AI. What’s of interest is that Lucas previously issued a statement in 2024 indicating that at least some of his position on AI is a feeling that it’s an inevitable change as opposed to being in favor of specific tools, noting that some of the digital technologies that people are calling “AI” now have existed since before the release of The Phantom Menace:
“We’ve been using it for 25 years. It’s not AI, but we used all the digital technology, because we helped pioneer a lot of that. Especially at ILM, because for a while, they were the only place that was doing digital. The thing of it is, it’s inevitable. It’s like saying ‘I don’t think these cars are gonna work. Let’s just stick with the horses, stick with the horses!’ And you can say that, but that isn’t the way the world works.”
Lucas’s current stance likewise says nothing about GenAI or AgenAI, but all the same has inspired controversy due to the broad labeling of anything related to digital technologies and artificial intelligence as “AI” in a pejorative fashion. If anything, it appears that he’s had this stance since he began work on the prequel trilogy over 30 years ago, with many of the innovations he helped apply since becoming industry standards despite public opposition. A later comment in the more recent interview strictly identifies an example of how AI can be used as a tool to spot digital fakery, and he notes that any new technology needs to be used responsibly:
“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that. Humans can’t; we’re not that smart. The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal you should be punished for that… Just like real life.”
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which has been the primary creative effort of George Lucas since selling the Star Wars franchise to Disney in 2012 and is notably supportive of art made by human hands, will finally open on September 22, 2026.
Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.