Nolan calls AI a 'glass Trojan horse' — and says public rejection is 'encouraging'

Christopher Nolan isn’t buying what the tech industry is selling. The director, whose “The Odyssey” is raking in box office returns, offered a characteristically blunt assessment of artificial intelligence: it’s a Trojan horse so obvious you can see right through it. “I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside,” Nolan told interviewer Hugo Travers. “It’s a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.”

What’s caught Nolan’s attention isn’t the technology itself so much as the public’s reaction to it. He described a level of rejection he finds unprecedented. “I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly [that’s been] so completely rejected by the public,” he said, pointing especially to young people who’ve coined the term “AI slop” to dismiss AI-generated content. For Nolan, that instinct to mock and reject is healthy — exactly the kind of skepticism that prevents blind faith in tools whose creators have their own agendas.

Nolan’s stance isn’t coming from a place of pure technophobia, though that’s a label he’s worn before. He’s famously resistant to smartphones and insisted on shooting “The Odyssey” entirely on Imax film, a first for a feature. But he frames it differently. He told The New York Times he considers himself a “techno-skeptic,” someone who embraces new tools but refuses to abandon systems that still work. His loyalty to film, he says, comes from it being “better in terms of representing the way the eye sees the world than any digital imaging system I’ve seen.”

The timing here matters. As president of the Directors Guild of America, Nolan was directly involved in contract negotiations that won generative AI protections. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes made AI a central battleground, and the suspicion Nolan celebrates hasn’t faded. If anything, it’s hardened into a cultural reflex. That a filmmaker who nearly watched his industry throw away celluloid entirely now sees the public as the last line of defense against another technology being shoved down everyone’s throat — that’s a plot twist worth paying attention to.