‘I’m just not threatened by it’: Steven Soderbergh is defiant about AI use in filmmaking

Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh insists that he doesn’t feel “threatened” by AI and is willing to use the technology if it improves the quality of his work.

Steven Soderbergh doesn’t feel “threatened” by AI.

The 63-year-old director has declared that he will be using “a lot” of the technology in his new picture about the Spanish-American war and feels “obligated” to use it in the filmmaking process if it enhances the product.

Soderbergh told Variety: “I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do.”

The Traffic filmmaker explained how AI was particularly useful for him during production on his forthcoming documentary about Beatles legend John Lennon.

Soderbergh said: “It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualise what John and Yoko (Ono) are speaking about philosophically.

“Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it.”

The Oscar-winning director stressed that the world is still in the “early stages” of understanding AI and has called for people not to rush into making doom-laden predictions about the tech.

He said: “I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, ‘That was a fun phase.’ We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to. “There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.”