Steven Spielberg has drawn a line in Hollywood’s sand, speaking on the IMO podcast as his new film Disclosure Day hits screens. He’s fine with algorithms finding shooting locations, but balks at the idea of code nudging a script, dressing a set, or calling the shots. His stance lands as studios and unions wrangle over AI’s legal and ethical reach, and not everyone shares his caution: Peter Jackson, for one, is more welcoming. At stake is who gets to steer cinema’s imagination, the machines that help or the humans who feel.

Some warnings land like a cold splash of water, and Steven Spielberg’s latest does just that. As AI seeps deeper into film development, the director who shaped generations of moviegoing says there’s a hard stop. Algorithms can sort, search, even assist. But stories, he argues, are human business, forged in memory and emotion, not mined from datasets.

Spielberg draws the line on AI in creativity

Steven Spielberg, the mind behind classics like Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, laid out his stance during a conversation on the IMO Podcast in May 2026. He was blunt: no system can replicate a soul. The timing is no accident. His new film, Disclosure Day, arrives as Hollywood reopens a charged conversation about authorship and what audiences actually trust.

AI: a tool, not a storyteller

Spielberg is not anti-technology. He welcomes AI for location scouting, scheduling, and other logistical chores that save time and money on set. But he rejects the idea of an empty chair at a writers’ table filled by a model that pitches dialogue or dictates shots. That, he says, erases the lived experience that gives a scene its pulse.

The Hollywood debate on AI ethics

His remarks surface while unions, studios, and filmmakers hash out boundaries for training data, consent, and credit. The friction is practical as much as philosophical: who owns a character riffed by a machine, and who gets paid when that riff ships? The broader worry is cultural. Can technology complement creativity without supplanting it entirely?

Keeping creativity human

Spielberg’s line is bright and simple. Use AI to scout a desert road faster, to mock up a set more efficiently, to index a decade of reference shots. Do not use it to decide a character’s arc, rewrite a scene’s heartbeat, or steer the camera. The audience, he argues, feels the difference, even if they cannot name it.

His message does not slam the door on progress. It invites a narrower, more careful lane for AI inside a craft built on risk, taste, and memory. As studios chase speed and scale, his reminder lands with weight: films endure because someone cared enough to make a choice only a person could make. That choice is the point.