Backrooms Director Kane Parsons Says No to AI in Filmmaking — Here’s Why

Another day, another filmmaker rolling their eyes at AI. This time it is Kane Parsons — the 20-year-old behind the viral horror series Backrooms — and he is not shy about where he stands.

Parsons vs. the prompt

In a recent chat with The Australian, Parsons basically said that outsourcing creativity to a model feels like hiring a stranger to dream on your behalf — technically impressive, maybe, but also kind of pointless. He even said that if he could snap his fingers and wipe generative AI off the map for good, he probably would. And no, he does not count prompt-writing as filmmaking.

"Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me."

That is not coming from a place of fear-of-tech either; it is a values thing. For him, movies are supposed to be messy and human. Replace the mess with a model, and you lose the part that makes the work worth doing.

The bigger picture he is reacting to

Parsons is one of the louder voices pushing back as AI slides deeper into studio workflows and executive wish lists. The sell from the top is simple: efficiency, scale, and saving money. The view from the creative side looks different: a slow sanding down of the human weirdness that gives films and TV their spark. Parsons points to what is already happening around him as the warning sign.

• Writers rooms experimenting with AI-generated drafts and outlines
• Concept art whipped up by image models instead of artists
• Actors ' faces and voices cloned, tweaked, and stitched together by software

Put that together, and you see why he is digging in. If making a movie turns into feeding a prompt and cleaning up the results, he is out. The whole point, in his view, is to wrestle something into existence with other humans — not to ask a machine to spit back a slick approximation of it.