Acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro spoke out about his thoughts on artificial intelligence and what he feels gets lost in the creative process when AI is used in art.
Del Toro popped into the r/movies subreddit for an AMA session with fans on September 9. One of these fans, going by the username ihs25ysf, asked him about some comments he’d made during a 2024 talk at the British Film Institute, where he said that AI can create “semi-compelling screensavers” and “that’s essentially that.”
“The value of art is not in how much it costs and how little effort it requires,” he said at the time. “It’s how much would you risk to be in its presence.”
Guillermo Del Toro on AI, emotion and the value of art.
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The Pan’s Labyrinth creator has been adamant that the human element of art be preserved — something for which he continued to advocate in his response to the fan, who asked him for his opinion on the “biggest thing lost” when a “computer generates an image instead of a human hand.”
To Del Toro, the “alchemy” of creativity and discovery humans experience when crafting a story or artwork is unachievable by a machine, and many of the best works are often elevated by “accidents” that happen during the creative process.
“The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don’t think about without that process,” he answered. “Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there’s a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%.”
He went on to use the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth as an example of this, describing how its design was inspired by an unlikely combination of a manta ray and artwork on a poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm.
“We sculpted it as an old man, with a face,” he continued. “And then I said, ‘Let’s take out the face.’ This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, ‘Take out the face,’ and then I said,’ Let’s put the eyes on the hands.’ This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it’s not linear.”
Del Toro brought up a conversation he had with Christopher Nolan about The Odyssey (which he previously shared with IGN), where he asked the director how he’d managed to convincingly pull off Odysseus and his crew braving Poseidon’s stormy seas.
“AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done,” he said. “Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist. And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You’re never a master; you’re always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him — because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model — and I asked him, ‘How did you do it?’ He said, ‘We put him in a storm in the ocean.’”
In another delightful anecdote, Del Toro mentioned a past conversation with James Cameron on the set of Terminator 2, describing how Cameron used “accidents” to increase audience immersion and overall believability.
“You’re gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, ’94, Jim Cameron and I became friends very fast. And we were looking at Terminator 2. And he was showing me the scene where Robert Patrick is in the back of the car, and he breaks the window with his arm. And he said, ‘You see those flares?’ I said yeah. He said, ‘We put them there, because the audience thinks an image is real, if you put an accident in it.’ That’s true. And I agree. The accident is vital. And the best accidents are things you don’t court. They just occur from the interaction with reality,” he said.
We got the chance to speak with Guillermo Del Toro as part of our IGN30 Icons Series, where he revealed how much he loved The Odyssey’s cyclops and told us about his favorite video games — one of which might surprise you.
Virginia Glaze
News Editor
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.
Image Credits: Randy Shropshire/Academy Museum Foundation via Getty Images
