Kore-eda critiques AI’s extractive logic: human grief and creativity resist algorithmic reduction in cinema’s crisis
Original framing: “Hirokazu Kore-eda says human imagination still matters in the age of AI” — The Japan Times
The tension between human creativity and mechanized art traces back to the Industrial Revolution’s deskilling of artisans, and recurs in the 20th century with the rise of assembly-line filmmaking (e.g., Hollywood’s studio system). Kore-eda’s critique echoes earlier auteur theory battles against studio interference, now repurposed against Silicon Valley’s data feudalism. The film’s themes parallel 1970s Japanese New Wave cinema’s rejection of commercial formulas, but today’s AI threat accelerates the crisis of artistic autonomy under late capitalism.
Kore-eda’s film exposes a deeper crisis: the collision of AI’s extractive logic with the sacred, communal nature of art, where grief and creativity are reduced to data points for corporate profit.
This tension is not new but a historical recurrence of capitalism’s assault on art’s autonomy, from Hollywood’s studio system to Silicon Valley’s data feudalism. The film’s trickster-like disruption—foregrounding the absurdity of AI’s emotional claims—resonates with cross-cultural traditions (e.g., Eshu’s subversion, *wabi-sabi*’s embrace of imperfection) that reject algorithmic purity. Yet the article’s framing obscures the material conditions of this crisis: the unpaid labor of marginalized creators fueling AI’s training, the corporate conglomerates profiting from both AI tools and traditional film, and the erasure of Indigenous and Global South narratives in these systems. The solution lies not in pitting humanism against AI but in reclaiming artistic sovereignty through cooperative ownership, cultural data sovereignty, and pedagogies that weaponize vulnerability against standardization. Kore-eda’s intervention is a call to action: to treat art as a site of resistance, not just a product, and to build futures where human imagination remains uncolonized by machines.