Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | April 1, 2026
Kathleen Kennedy is no stranger to pissing off nerds who assume that they are the ones who decide what a good movie is. Her time at Lucasfilm was marred by a bunch of neck-bearded losers who were upset that, among other things, a bunch of fascist villains was portrayed as bumbling, arrogant losers. So, in short, she has made all the right enemies, and while her time at Lucasfilm is over, she hasn’t stopped making it clear that she knows what she’s talking about.
The longtime producer’s career is insane. One of her earliest gigs was as an associate producer on Raiders of the Lost Arc, and since then, she’s been one of the minds behind films like Jurassic Park, Lincoln, and, dammit, Congo! To say that she knows what she’s doing would be an understatement. If anything, it would be fairer to say that her wealth of experience makes her suited to tell whether something is going to be effective at movie-making or not. And, at a recent AI conference, she cast some doubt.
Kennedy was speaking with Cristobal Valenzuela, CEO of the AI company Runway, and basically told this dude to his face that AI doesn’t have the life experience to make good art (according to THR). “Taste is so fundamental to the process of creating things,” she explained. “It’s life experiences; it’s educational. The best directors of films and photography came out of art, they studied art.” She went on to note that AI falls short in execution, saying, “There’s [beautiful] unpredictability in the creative process that’s going to be tricky to preserve because AI is so predictable.”
She also took a moment to point out the lack of transparency when it comes to AI, which is another huge aspect of the issue. We’ve already seen cases where background actors were tricked into giving up their likenesses to potentially be used whenever a company wants. Plenty of AI moguls have noted that regulations would cause them to falter (gee, that’s weird), so aspects of the technology have been forced on people against their will and without a full explanation. That needs to change, even if it means the death of the tech.
While Kennedy does admit that AI may have some practical uses in the film community when it comes to planning schedules or allocating budgets, that’s been more or less happening for years already anyway. There are aspects of the industry that are ready for AI integration, which allow creative folks to focus on what they do best. But if you used it to make a movie, you’d never wind up with something as beautiful and unpredictable as The Last Jedi pissing off a bunch of vitamin-D-deficient dweebs.
