No AI for LAIKA: Travis Knight calls it 'theft,' vows never to use it
Travis Knight just drew a hard line on AI — and you won’t see him crossing it.
Asked point-blank on The Playlist’s The Discourse podcast whether LAIKA would ever use AI tools, CEO and Wildwood director Travis Knight didn’t hedge. He shut the door on the idea in seconds.
“Absolutely f****** not,”
Knight followed with a wider rebuke aimed at generative systems scraping artists’ work to spit out pastiche.
“AI is theft. It ’s the ingestion of years and years and years of human creativity and ingenuity, regurgitated back. It has no humanity. It has no spirit.”
He acknowledged, per the interview, that machine learning can be a lifesaver in areas like healthcare or heavy data tasks. But when it comes to making art, he drew a hard line, framing LAIKA’s stop‑motion process as a fundamentally human craft built on hands, light, puppets and patience—not algorithms.
- Coraline — the studio’s breakthrough dark fantasy
- Kubo and the Two Strings — an Oscar- nominated epic
- Wildwood — Knight’s latest as director
Read more: ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year goes to John Carpenter, honoring his legendary career
Looking beyond fantasy
Knight also sketched out what’s next. Multiple new projects are in the very early stages, and he said he’s steering away from the fantastical worlds that have defined much of his filmography.
After spending nearly twenty years getting Wildwood across the finish line, he’s chasing reinvention—pushing himself as a storyteller and director into unfamiliar genres and new narrative territory. The risks are part of the appeal, he said, and the work is already underway on those next ventures.
Earlier we wrote: Beating Viggo Mortensen isn’t Jamie Dornan’s aim in The Lord of the Rings