Seth Rogen Has Zero Patience for AI Scriptwriting

Seth Rogen is not interested in any tool that makes him write less — and he wants Hollywood to know it.

Speaking to Brut at the Cannes Film Festival, the actor, writer, and producer didn’t hold back when asked about artificial intelligence in filmmaking. “I don’t understand what it’s supposed to do,” he said. “Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ what follows is the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life. And if your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process — you shouldn’t be a writer. Because you’re not writing.”

He kept going. “Go do something else. And if you don’t want to go through the process, you shouldn’t be a writer. The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing.”

It’s a blunt take, but it lands with some weight coming from Rogen, who has spent decades building a career around the craft of writing — from Superbad to The Boys to everything in between. For him, the process isn’t a burden to be optimized away. It’s the point.

Every Frame Has a Human Touch

Rogen is at Cannes to promote Tangles, an animated film directed by Leah Nelson that follows a young illustrator named Sarah as she faces her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and its ripple effect on her family. When the interviewer mentioned she was glad no AI was involved in the production, Rogen confirmed it without hesitation. “Not at all. It’s hand-drawn animation. Every frame has a human touch to it, which is great.”

The film premiered Friday and earned a seven-minute ovation from the Cannes audience — the kind of response that tends to follow something that genuinely moves people.

That emotional resonance is personal. Lauren Miller Rogen, Seth’s wife and a producer on the film, told Variety that she felt an immediate and deep connection to the story from the moment she read it. “There were so many similarities between my family and Sarah’s family,” she said. “Our moms were both teachers who were diagnosed in their early 50s. I related to the denial, fear and sense of aloneness that can come with a dementia diagnosis.”

Before the premiere, she told Deadline the film “spoke to me in such a sincere and deep way.” The Rogens co-founded Hilarity for Charity, an Alzheimer’s nonprofit, years ago — so this isn’t a cause they stumbled into. It’s one they’ve been living.

The trailer for Tangles gives a sense of what audiences at Cannes responded to — quiet, hand-drawn, deeply human. Exactly the kind of thing Rogen was talking about when he said no AI tool could replace the process of actually making something.

“The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me,” he said again, “because I like writing.”

Hard to argue with that.