Kane Parsons, AI and the Emotional Life of Tools
Kane Parsons is not in the news because he said something predictable about AI. He is in the news because, at twenty, he has become one of the strangest success stories in contemporary filmmaking: a young director who moved from internet horror, YouTube, free 3D software and self taught digital worldbuilding into a major A24 release with Backrooms, a film reported to have opened at number one, with about 81.5 million dollars domestically and 118 million dollars worldwide, and described by A24 and industry outlets as the studio’s biggest theatrical opening to date. That context matters because Parsons does not fit the lazy categories through which the AI debate usually organizes itself. He is not an old filmmaker defending an analog past. He is not standing outside digital culture, suspicious of every new tool because he never had to learn one. His work emerged from the very world often used to justify the technological acceleration of cinema: online platforms, accessible software, fan culture, self education, 3D animation and the collapse of old entry barriers. He is exactly the kind of filmmaker the future was supposed to produce.
And then he said that, if he could make generative AI disappear forever, he probably would.
He also said that these tools give him no creative enjoyment and that, for him, they defeat the purpose of filmmaking. The quote travelled immediately, because of course it did. It had everything the current debate likes: a young successful filmmaker, a disputed technology, a clean emotional position and enough friction to keep comment sections moving. Evolving AI, which describes itself as the world’s largest AI community with more than four million followers, also turned the statement into a discussion prompt. That detail is not incidental. A community built around keeping AI central can use even a rejection of AI as material, because the value is not only agreement. The value is attention.
That is where the story becomes more interesting than the quote itself.
Parsons said something personal about creative satisfaction. The discourse immediately made it available for use. An AI friendly audience can treat the statement as productive friction: a successful digital native rejecting generative AI keeps the room lively without ever allowing the room to stop being about AI. An AI critical audience can treat the same statement as confirmation: here is someone formed by modern tools, someone who came through YouTube and 3D software, still saying no to this particular tool. Both readings may contain something true. Both can also turn the filmmaker into evidence before they have actually listened to what he said.
His statement was not simply about technology. It was about relation.
He said these tools give him no creative enjoyment. That is not a small point. It is also not a universal theory of cinema. A filmmaker can say that a tool has no place in his own creative life without declaring that nobody else can ever use it meaningfully. He can defend the conditions under which his work feels alive without becoming a mascot for anyone else’s argument. The phrase “for me” matters because it keeps the sentence attached to a working process instead of a campaign.
The AI debate has very little patience for that attachment. It prefers positions that travel quickly. It wants allegiance, contradiction and camp logic. Are you for AI or against it? Are you adapting or resisting? Are you future ready or afraid? These questions look clarifying, but they often only compress experience. They turn preference into alignment, hesitation into weakness, refusal into ideology and curiosity into endorsement. The tool stops being a tool and becomes a signal.
That is a strange way to talk about art, because artists have always had private, uneven and sometimes contradictory relationships with tools. A painter who prefers watercolor is not declaring war on oil paint. A painter working with acrylic is not announcing the death of charcoal. A sculptor choosing wood is not condemning bronze. A photographer who loves an old manual lens is not automatically making a public case against autofocus. These choices can be practical, aesthetic, physical, emotional, historical or temperamental. They belong to the hand before they belong to a debate.
I prefer watercolor myself. Not because I think oil paint should disappear. Not because acrylic is illegitimate. Not because digital painting is fraudulent. I like watercolor because of the way it behaves. It moves, stains, escapes, settles and remembers timing. It has an instability that keeps me honest. You can guide it, but you cannot completely dominate it. It leaves traces of decisions, but also traces of accident. It asks for patience without becoming passive. It gives pleasure because it resists in a way that still feels alive.
Another artist may need the density of oil paint, the slow working time, the possibility of returning to the surface again and again. Another may need the speed and flatness of acrylic. Another may think most freely on a tablet because layers, undo functions and iteration match the rhythm of their imagination. None of this needs to become a referendum on everybody else. It is the ordinary complexity of making things. Medium is often temperament, body, memory and contact.
Generative AI complicates that analogy because it is not just another brush. Its legal, economic and cultural consequences are far larger. Training data, consent, authorship, provenance, style extraction, labour displacement, ownership and industrial pressure are serious issues. They cannot be dissolved into the comfortable claim that every tool is just a tool. Tools are not neutral. Production systems are not neutral. Markets are not neutral. Yet the fact that a tool has political consequences does not mean every individual relation to that tool can be reduced to politics.
An artist may reject generative AI because of ethics. Another may reject it because of labour politics. Another may reject it because the result feels empty. Another may use it experimentally while remaining deeply critical of the industry building it. Another may use it for one stage of work and refuse it for another. These are not contradictions that need to be flattened. They are the real texture of artistic practice.
Parsons’ statement matters because it touches that texture. He did not merely say that generative AI is legally complicated or economically dangerous, although those concerns surround the whole debate. He said he gets no creative enjoyment from it. That sentence is easy to overlook because it sounds like feeling rather than policy. In art, feeling is not decorative. Creative satisfaction is not a bonus added after the serious work has been optimized. It is one of the reasons people endure the work at all.
Filmmaking is already full of compromise. It is waiting, negotiation, exhaustion, financial pressure, technical failure, broken plans, bad weather, missing time, collapsing schedules, difficult conversations and the repeated humiliation of seeing imagination meet reality. Anyone who has worked close to production knows that the romance of filmmaking is often carried by very unromantic labour. Under those conditions, the moments of genuine creative contact matter deeply. The feeling that a decision was yours. The feeling that an image was discovered, not merely obtained. The feeling that the process pushed back and made you sharper. The feeling that the work left a mark on you and that you left a mark on the work.
When a tool gives an artist none of that, speed is not an answer.
Much of the AI hype becomes emotionally tone deaf at precisely this point. It talks fluently about acceleration, scale, access, democratization, disruption and productivity, but often has almost no language for the moment when an artist looks at a result and feels no contact with it. No memory of the path. No pressure of a decision. No trace of the struggle that made the work necessary. Just an image that arrived. Perhaps useful. Perhaps beautiful. Perhaps even commercially effective. Still not necessarily authored in the way that artist needs authorship to feel.
This does not make generative AI useless for everyone. It does not mean every AI assisted process is empty. A serious artist may use such tools as rough material, provocation, sketch, reference or part of a larger chain of writing, editing, design, performance, compositing, selection and revision. In that case, authorship may live in the larger process, not in the first output. Another artist may touch the same tool and feel that the essential relationship has been severed. For one person, the tool opens a door. For another, it removes the room. A serious conversation about AI in filmmaking has to survive that complexity.
The harder question is what kind of relationship to making generative AI creates, for whom, under what conditions and at what cost. That question cannot be answered by a tool demo. It cannot be answered by a box office number. It cannot be answered by a quote turned into a LinkedIn prompt.
And yet the prompt is where so much of this ends up.
A platform built around keeping people ahead in AI can post an anti AI statement without contradiction, because attention is value. Friction is value. Dissent is value. A filmmaker refusing the tool can still keep the tool central. The more people argue under the post, the more the frame wins. The discussion may look open, but the gravitational centre remains unchanged. AI stays in the middle. Everything else is arranged around it.
The artist’s relation to the work becomes less important than the content value of the artist’s position. The question quietly changes. It no longer asks what this filmmaker is trying to make, why this tool fails him or what kind of creative contact he is trying to protect. It asks how the sentence can be used in the next round of AI debate. Once every artistic preference becomes content, the artist is no longer being listened to. He is being processed. His craft becomes context. His discomfort becomes engagement. His refusal becomes another way to keep the market excited, anxious, divided and attentive.
This is where the paint analogy stops being an analogy and becomes the actual argument. A painter choosing watercolor is choosing a relation to time, accident, control, surface and failure. The medium is not merely the route to the image. It is the way the image becomes thinkable. Filmmaking has its own versions of that. A director may need physical sets, previs, improvisation, animation, virtual production, handheld cameras, miniatures, found locations or the slowness of building a world by hand in 3D. These are not only production methods. They are different ways of finding the film.
A tool is not just a route to an image. It is a way of thinking toward an image.
Parsons’ discomfort should be treated as information from inside the act of making. Maybe generative AI does not give him the resistance he needs. Maybe it removes the wrong difficulty. Maybe it offers output where he needs process. Maybe it gives him images without the kind of contact that makes the images worth having. We do not have to pretend we know more than he said. We only have to respect that what he said belongs first to craft, not to content strategy.
The future of film will not be shaped by every artist arriving at the same answer to generative AI. That was never how art worked. Some filmmakers will use it seriously, carefully and with real authorship. Some will refuse it completely. Some will touch it for one task and reject it for another. Some will discover that it helps them think. Others will discover that it makes them feel strangely absent from their own work. The work needs that range of experience. It needs artists to speak honestly about what gives them contact and what removes it.
That honesty is already being trained out of the conversation. The hype economy does not need every artist to love AI. It only needs every artist to keep explaining themselves in relation to it. Approval, suspicion, refusal, curiosity, exhaustion and anger all become useful as long as the tool remains the centre of the frame. A filmmaker tries to speak about creative purpose, and the conversation rearranges itself until the software is once again the main character. The person making the work becomes secondary to the position that can be extracted from him.
The damage is not dramatic at first. It happens through countless small conversions. A working preference becomes a public position. A private resistance becomes a content object. A sentence about satisfaction becomes a growth mechanism. A filmmaker’s attempt to describe the conditions under which making still feels meaningful is absorbed by a system that has almost no interest in meaning unless meaning can be made to perform.
Over time, artists learn the lesson. They learn that every preference can be used against them or for someone else. They learn that saying “this does not work for me” may no longer be heard as a craft statement, but as a signal in someone else’s campaign. The conversation around making becomes less honest, less tactile, less personal, less useful. It becomes louder and thinner at the same time.
A filmmaker choosing or rejecting generative AI deserves the kind of seriousness that does not rush to turn preference into proof.
A tool choice is not always a statement. Sometimes it is the last private place where an artist can still feel whether the work is alive. If even that place is turned into content, the loss is not theoretical. The work may still be produced. The images may still arrive. The posts may still perform. But something essential has been displaced: the fragile, stubborn, bodily knowledge that making is not only about what appears on the screen, but about whether the path toward it still belongs to the person who made it.
Once the conversation about art has been replaced by the conversation about tools, culture does not need to be destroyed. It only needs to be managed.