Zack Snyder Shares Refreshingly Candid Take On AI in Hollywood

Zack Snyder has a new movie at TIFF, which means it’s hot take season for Johnny Polarizing over here. However, this time around, Snyder shared a refreshingly honest insight into how AI is burrowing into Hollywood. While Snyder is no stranger to CGI and VFX heavy spectacles, that doesn’t mean he’s gung ho about AI. But he has no delusions about how it’s undoubtedly being used more than anyone suspects.

“My current rules on AI are that I’m very adamant that the shots are made by a person — the framing, the composition. I don’t want AI making shots,” Snyder told Variety. “And I’m very adamant that the people are people — real humans — in the shot. The film I just made is the furthest thing from AI. There’s dirt in the film. The problem is, when you’re into the VFX pipelines now, who knows what’s happening back there.”

This is where Snyder lifts the lid on VFX studios where, frankly, AI has been being used and developed ages before Silicon Valley muddied the waters and turned AI into a digital Satan. (Saying it’s going to take everyone’s jobs will do that!) Do I think AI writing is anathema? Yes. Do I hate the slop images that are all over social media so badly it spills into our comments? You bet. That said, does AI have valuable technical applications in VFX, coding, medicine, and other fields? Absolutely, but people are way too eager to toss out bath water-soaked babies instead of finding ethical solutions. Zack Snyder is willing to thread that needle.

In the creation of images, there’s going to be a lot of crossover in the VFX world between CGI and AI. That line is getting blurrier and blurrier. If we were shooting this [points to table], having AI take that plant out? Pretty fucking easy. Anybody can do it. If you and I are still you and I in the shot, did that happen in the backrooms of some visual effects company that I don’t know about? Possibly. But don’t change the people. That’s the line, for me — the people have to be real.

Because then it truly lacks humanity if there aren’t actual humans in it.

That’s the slippery slope. Once you accept that, then you’ll accept anything, and then certain movies are dead. We know that there are backrooms visual effects pipelines where we make a shot and then I go, “Oh, it would be cool if there was a CG lamp on the table.” They say, “Sure,” and give it to the visual effects company. It comes back and we go, “Good work. But how exactly did you do that?” And they say, “Oh, we did a CG model, we did texturing, we shot some photographs.” And I say, “Oh, that’s the old CG pipeline. That sounds good.” But do I know that’s true? No, I don’t. So there’s the reality of where we are right now, which is, it costs a lot to make that CG lamp the old way, but how much does it cost to put an AI lamp there that looks basically the same? Very little. Maybe they charge me the same! I don’t know. And I don’t know this for a fact, but that must be happening because of the economics.

Personally, I appreciate this kind of candor even if it’s still in the “AI is inevitable” genre. At least Snyder is being upfront and not going to either extreme by being an unapologetic shill or a zealotous detractor. Of course, this is Zack Snyder we’re talking about, so don’t worry, he definitely said some very Zack Snyder things including, but not limited to:

A former Warner Bros. exec secretly told Snyder that he was right about everything he was doing with the DCEU.
The Paramount merger is good actually.
300 is the gayest movie ever made.
Superman’s underwear still sucks.

Never change, Z-Dawg.