Steven Spielberg Insists He'd 'Never Have Used AI' In Disclosure Day After Emily Blunt Claims

Steven Spielberg has clarified his stance on AI in cinema after Emily Blunt′ recent comments about their new film, Disclosure Day.

In Spielberg’s new sci-fi blockbuster, Emily plays a local weatherwoman who begins speaking in an unusual, clicking alien language mid-broadcast, for reasons that become apparent over the course of the film.

During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the British star opened up about the origins of these noises, claiming that Spielberg had told her: “You know, we could do it with AI, or you could do it.”

“I was like, ‘I feel confident I can make some weird noises’,” she then quipped.

Meanwhile, she also revealed to Hot Ones host Sean Evans that AI was something she was “a bit terrified of” when it was apparently presented to her as an option for her Disclosure Day character’s alien language.

Since then, Spielberg sat down with ITV News to discuss the film, during which Emily’s comments about him supposedly offering to create these sounds with generative AI were brought up.

“I would never have used AI,” he insisted. “I would have gone the old-fashioned way, you get a dolphin, an elephant, you slow it down, you speed it up, you play it backwards.”

He added that his Oscar-winning sound designer, Gary Rydstrom, would have found an organic way to make the sounds had Emily not been able to do them herself.

Spielberg has put his foot down on using generative AI during the filmmaking process in the past. 

“I’m not willing to substitute, because I don’t really believe in sentience,” he said on the IMO podcast in March. “I don’t believe there is any substitute for the soul. I don’t think that is an algorithm that is inventible.”

He claimed: “Use AI as a tool, but do not use AI as the final word on anything creative. That’s where I draw the line.”

Explaining how she settled on the sounds that eventually made it into Disclosure Day, she told Entertainment Weekly that she had sent the iconic filmmaker voice notes of herself “clicking, humming, doing weird Barry White low singing mixed with clicking mixed with Morse code sounds”.

“I just tried everything,” she added. “We sort of threw the kitchen sink at it, and I think he wanted it to sound mathematical and not too terrifying.”

The Devil Wears Prada actor shared that the final version audiences hear in Disclosure Day is a mix of layered noises she recorded in a sound booth.

Emily also expanded on Hot Ones about how she and the sound team for Disclosure Day ultimately created the chilling sounds that get broadcast across America in the film without AI.

She explained that the sound engineer had one microphone by her mouth and another by her throat to “capture it in a really weird way”. 

“And then the sound designer went away and created that weird sound,” she continued. “Even kind of leading up to that moment where she starts speaking in this non-human language, it’s a four-minute oner that we shot that leads up to that moment where she’s gradually sort of disintegrating.”

Disclosure Day is out now in cinemas.