‘Backrooms’ Director Kane Parsons Calls AI “Genuinely Harmful”

With a record-breaking A24 directorial debut under his belt at age 20, Kane Parsons doesn’t see a place for AI in Hollywood’s future.

The Backrooms director recently emphasized the “genuinely harmful consequences” that have already begun unfolding as generative AI becomes more popular in Hollywood and beyond.

“I think I’m in the same boat as most well-adjusted people,” Parsons told The Australian. “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.

While Parsons sees the potential for AI assistance to be useful in the more tedious VFX tasks, “right now it’s difficult to discuss objectively because there’s so much at stake and so many genuinely harmful consequences already happening.”

And although he’s not a fan of using AI in the creative process, Parsons is interested in exploring it as a topic in his upcoming work.

“What interests me more is interrogating it artistically,” he explained. “We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop. That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.

“I’m interested in using that iconography in art – not using AI to make the art itself, but examining what it represents. I definitely want to explore it further in future projects,” added Parsons.

Deadline recently spoke to Parsons over Zoom from the editing bay as he put the final touches on Backrooms, for which he and his VFX team used Blender, the same free CGI tool he learned on “a fairly crummy laptop” in middle school, with the help of some YouTube tutorials and other software he obtained “through means that I won’t say out loud,” to eventually bring his web series to life at 16.

“It’s feasible, and even on a pretty shitty machine, you can still get the ball rolling,” insisted Parsons of the self-taught process to fellow creatives with the hunger to get their own ideas off the ground.