The 82-year-old filmmaker who built Industrial Light & Magic now says artificial intelligence makes movies easier to make—and compares the people resisting it to those who once clung to horses over cars. George Lucas has spent a career betting on technology. He invented the tools he needed for Star Wars, waited years for effects to catch up to his prequel vision, and pioneered digital editing when analogue frustrated him. So when the man who founded ILM in 1975 came out swinging for artificial intelligence, it wasn’t exactly a plot twist.Speaking to A Rabbit’s Foot ahead of the autumn opening of his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Lucas dismissed the anti-AI camp as latter-day luddites. “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he said. His comparison was blunt: resisting AI is like insisting the horse and buggy is where it’s at while cars break down and need gas. “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.“
Why the ILM founder was never going to be an AI sceptic
For Lucas, digital tools were never a rupture—they were the natural evolution of an art form. He’s fond of telling friends who swear they’ll never shoot digital that cinema isn’t a technology at all. “It’s the moving image,” he has said. “It’s not a technology, it’s an idea.” That worldview traces back decades, to a college fight with a script professor over whether film even needs scripts.The track record backs him up. When existing effects couldn’t deliver the shots he wanted for Star Wars, he founded Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 and reinvented what was possible on screen. When analogue editing frustrated him, he helped build its digital replacement. Lucas has spent 50 years betting that the next tool is worth learning rather than fearing—so his AI stance isn’t a departure. It’s the same instinct that made him one of cinema’s most influential technologists in the first place.
Hollywood is bitterly split, and Star Wars’ creator picked the ‘dark side’
But the endorsement lands at an awkward moment. AI has split Hollywood down the middle. Critics say the technology trains on human art without consent and threatens to hollow out creative jobs. The Odyssey director Christopher Nolan recently noted that no technology has been so eagerly embraced by Wall Street and so thoroughly rejected by young people, who coined the term “AI slop.” Backrooms director Kane Parsons called it “cultural rot.” To them, Lucas has gone over to the dark side—embracing the very tech accused of stealing from the humans he built a career celebrating.Lucas isn’t the only big name breaking the other way. Martin Scorsese drew backlash after joining AI image company Black Forest Labs as an adviser. Rogue One director Gareth Edwards has praised generative AI’s usefulness in colourful terms. Steven Soderbergh, who used AI-generated sequences in a Lennon documentary, sits somewhere in the middle, wondering aloud whether we’ll all look back on this as “a fun phase.”The battle lines run past filmmakers, too. Music streaming service TIDAL recently said it won’t pay royalties on AI-generated songs, while industry bodies have penned open letters demanding consent from artists before any AI deals are signed. Meta pulled its own AI image generator this week after backlash from actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, admitting it “missed the mark.” Into that noise walks Lucas, a filmmaker whose entire legacy is built on inventing technology nobody asked for—and being proved right.
Georgle Lucas thinks AI can police its own problems
Pushed on the risks, Lucas didn’t retreat—he pointed to AI as its own referee. “If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he said. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart.” His logic is that responsibility stays with the person: do something illegal and you should be punished, and whatever you make should be traceable back to you. “It’s just like real life.”It’s a striking position from a director whose upcoming museum is a billion-dollar temple to human-made art—comic panels, pulp covers, film illustrations, a collection topping 100,000 pieces. Lucas installed himself as lead curator after two senior curators departed, and the institution opens next year on the same faith in his own judgement that shaped Star Wars.Lucas hasn’t sat in a director’s chair since Revenge of the Sith in 2005, selling the Star Wars franchise to Disney for $4 billion in 2012. His filmmaking days may be behind him. His appetite for whatever comes next, clearly, is not.
