Peter Jackson Dismisses AI Fears at Cannes With Tool Claim
Peter Jackson said at Cannes on Wednesday morning that he is not particularly concerned about artificial intelligence in filmmaking, casting AI as a practical production tool rather than a threat. He used the platform to draw a line between the software and the person operating it, after accepting an honorary Palme d’Or the night before.
Cannes and the AI line
“AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool,” Jackson said, adding that the outcome depends on “the imagination and originality of the person, you know, feeding the instructions into the AI program.” That is the sharpest part of his argument: the technology does not decide quality on its own, and he said some people will make “really, really great films” while others will make films that “will be crap.”
Jackson pushed that point further by asking, “Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative? Has it been stitched together well to make a narrative, a story?” For a filmmaker speaking in front of a Cannes audience, that is a blunt assessment of where creative value still sits — with the person shaping the material, not the machine generating it.
From stop-motion to software
Jackson compared today’s AI tools with the early stop-motion methods behind the original King Kong and the Ray Harryhausen movies. “Those were done with stop-motion by a person moving a rubber creature,” he said, before adding, “Why shouldn’t somebody on a computer using AI software be able to create their own imagery?”
The comparison matters because Jackson was not speaking from the sidelines. He was at Cannes to accept an honorary Palme d’Or, and the same event gave him room to discuss his early films Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead, plus the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and his recent documentary work, including The Beatles: Get Back.
Elijah Wood in the room
A few hundred adoring fans were in the room when Elijah Wood sat among the audience for the talk session, a reminder that Jackson’s comments landed inside a career retrospective, not a closed-door industry panel. Jackson said Wood was “relentlessly cheerful every single day” on set and “always there to help me make the movie I wanted to make,” which gave the discussion a personal edge before it returned to process and technology.
Jackson’s stance leaves the industry with a fairly clean read: he is not treating AI as a creative emergency, and he is not pretending the tools are neutral either. He is arguing that the decisive factor is still the filmmaker’s taste, which is exactly why the people building images on computers are now part of the same creative conversation as the people once moving rubber creatures frame by frame.
