‘Ghostbusters’ director Paul Feig strongly criticizes AI launch as he achieves milestone
Paul Feig, the director of The Housemaid, has spoken out against artificial intelligence (A.I.) at a recent event.
On Saturday, June 20, the 63-year-old American filmmaker and actor attended the 2026 Nantucket Film Festival, where his work in the entertainment world was appreciated, as he was honoured with the Visionary Storyteller Tribute.
In his speech after receiving the award from Rose Byrne, Feig articulated his thoughts on the future of storytelling in the entertainment industry after the launch of A.I.
He began, “I’ve always loved the term storyteller. Telling stories is one of humankind’s greatest gifts to the universe.”
“I’ve always been in awe of storytellers … the screenwriters and authors and playwrights and journalists and all who take us on a journey through their words and visions, and make us see a world through different eyes.”
“Our stories unite us. They bring us closer together by breaking down the idea of ‘the other’ and making us all one: a planet of people who are strong and weak, confident and neurotic, wonderful and insufferable and all the other things that make us deliciously human,” the Bridesmaids director explained.
According to Feig, storytelling is “as important as the food that we eat and the air that we breathe,” and slammed the launch of A.I., highlighting the impending danger of it on Hollywood.
“Today, a lot of us in the storytelling business are being confronted by a rather terrifying technological development: A.I.,” he quipped, adding that it is a “technology literally none of us asked for” and something “billionaires are investing huge amounts of money [into] to reduce their workforce and raise their profits.”
“The reason I bring this up is not to be a purveyor of doom. I’m here to try to bring us some sort of reassurance, because A.I. is not us. It’s not who we are — it’s who we were. Years ago. Months ago. Days ago. Hours ago. Minutes ago,” Feig said.
He went on to quip that A.I. mixes and matches what has been done and turns it into something that looks original, which we all know is not the case.
“It’s our old ideas,” the Ghostbusters creator quipped. “It’s our old experiences, the things that we wrote and said and lived through already.”
“Until the day we die, we keep changing, we keep evolving, we keep having new experiences and new thoughts and new ideas. We are living, breathing human beings who face an infinite sea of choices and possibilities…. A.I. lives in our past. We live in our present, and we will live in our future. And all A.I. can do is follow and try to sound and be like us,” Paul Feig said.
