Jenna Ortega just warned that “it’s very easy to be terrified” of the “deep uncertainty” that artificial intelligence introduces to the film industry.
Jenna served on the jury for the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco, alongside Parasite director Bong Joon Ho (who served as jury president), Anya Taylor-Joy, Past Lives director Celina Song, plus other notable actors and filmmakers.
Per Variety, during the press conference, Jenna was asked about the proliferation of AI in cinema, and Jenna and the Parasite director made it very clear how they felt about the rise of AI in filmmaking.
“When you look back at history, we just always take things too far and I think it’s easy to be terrified — I know I am — of deep uncertainty.”
“It kind of feels like we’ve opened up Pandora’s box in a way,” she added. “But we were talking about this as a group — getting ready to open the festival — about how in these difficult and confusing times, oftentimes it pushes the artist to speak out more, to do more, for there to be this new awakening and passion and protection and I want to assume and hope that that’s the case.”
Jenna continued, “But there’s certain things that AI just isn’t able to replicate. Yes, there’s beauty in difficulty and there’s beauty in mistakes, and a computer can’t do that. A computer has no soul.”
“It’s nothing we’ll be able to resonate with really, and two, I don’t want to assume for the audience but I would hope it gets to a point where it becomes sort of mental junk food, AI, and we feel sick and we don’t know why… I think, as terrible as it is to say, sometimes audiences need to be deprived of something in order to appreciate something again,” she finished.
Jenna’s remarks have gone viral, sparking strong reactions to the Wednesday actor’s criticism of the artificial intelligence.
“Jenna dropping the realest take Hollywood’s too scared to touch. She basically said what everyone in the industry whispers off-camera: AI movies look shiny, but they’re empty calories. No soul, no grit, no weird human spark — just algorithmic sludge dressed up in 8K,” one person wrote on X, adding that she’s right about audiences getting sick of it.
Another person wrote, “We have machines that can throw a baseball 1000 mph. It’s cool but nobody ultimately is emotionally connected to what a robot can do. It’s why people pay millions of dollars for art that humans make even though you could make something even better with AI…..”
Another person said, “Jenna calling AI’ mental junk food’ is funny. Hollywood has been serving cultural fast-food for decades and only now discovered the term. AI isn’t degrading anything, it’s exposing who got too comfortable. If art needs to ban a tool to survive, then the problem was never the tool.”
Finally, another user said, “I get what she means. If everything becomes AI-generated, the baseline shifts and we stop noticing the craft. It feels like the real challenge is finding the balance where AI helps the process without flattening the soul of the work.”
What do you think about the expansion of AI in filmmaking? Share your thoughts in the comments.