The legendary German director Werner Herzog had a few choice words about other so-called “filmmakers” who use AI to imitate their inspirations — one of those inspirations being himself.
In an interview with IndieWire, the 84-year-old — whose wide-ranging filmography includes 1982’s “Fitzcarraldo,” 2009’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” and 1979’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre“ — was asked about a 2025 movie called “About a Hero,” which made heavy use of AI to evoke the style of his films. It gets even more on the nose than that: on top of using an AI-generated script trained on his movies, it also featured AI-deepfaked Herzog as the narrator.
The flesh and blood director didn’t sound impressed.
“The intention of this young filmmaker was never to remake any [of my films], but making something in the spirit. And I immediately said, ‘You will fail. It is such a stupid idea,’” he said, in what we can imagine was his trademark husky voice.
“‘It’s phenomenally, abysmally stupid,’” Herzog drove home. “‘I will not take part in it.’”
Herzog seemed to venture that if AI is useful for anything, it’s replacing the talentless hacks.
“It’s so standardized that AI can step in because there’s not real storytelling,” Herzog sneered. “It’s mimicry of something that has happened before.”
“And I welcome AI to replace all the idiots who are into nothing but repeating, repeating, repeating until it’s ad nauseam,” he told IndieWire. “When it’s ad nauseam, please, please, please let AI step in and do the job.”
When it comes to artists, the irony of a technology like AI, which promises to let users create virtually anything they want, is that rather than realizing their creativity, it instead often ends up exposing how little of it they actually possess. Truly interesting uses of AI in art are few and far between; by and large it simply automates the process of churning out something unoriginal, only without the human spark or rawness unique to all of us that can elevate a work.
This isn’t the first time Herzog — who provocatively proclaimed that a “computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years,” — has unloaded on AI.
In a conversation with the comedian Conan O’Brien last year, he praised the tech’s “magnificent abilities” in applications like science, but sounded grave about how AI is being used in warfare.
He was no less despondent about its intrusion in the arts.
“I’ve seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence. Story, acting, everything. They look completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul,” he told O’Brien, as quoted by Gizmodo.
“You know it is the most common, lowest denominator of what is filling billions and billions of informations on the internet,” he continued. “The common denominator and nothing beyond this common denominator can be found in these fabrications.”
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