BENGALURU: Award-winning filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, who loves to rub shoulders with technology as he recently announced his new AI-generated sci-fi series Warlord, is confident that artificial intelligence just cannot replace human emotions.
In a fireside chat with Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw on ‘Exploring creativity in the age of AI’ at the Bengaluru Tech Summit-2025 at BIEC here on Wednesday evening, Kapur said he loves AI as he can cut his work to size. He agreed that if AI were to be there at the time he produced Mr India (1987), it would have replaced the techniques of its making. But that would not have been the case with his debut movie ‘Masoom’ (1983), which is filled with emotions. AI can only replace techniques in the making of action movies, he opined.
“It’s the close-up that AI will always struggle in... because we, when we are born as babies, we understand our existence by watching the pupils of adults... it’s a pupil-to-pupil talk and often your brain and what we call intelligence doesn’t come into it,” he correlated.
“AI works on predictability. It can only do what can be predictable. It cannot do that which is unpredictable, because we’ve built AI - even the large language models - have been built on what can be predicted,” he stated. He said that loving the risk of the unpredictable is the creativity which he embraced in his career.
“Storytelling is nothing but finite being trying to connect with the infinity... conflict in the harmony, connect with the infinity,” he connoted. He, however, liked the democratising power of AI as it destroys the barriers of technology as a movie that required $200 million can be done with $2,000.
A housemaid will be able to make a better presentation by using ChatGPT than her landlord, who would be a top university output as the AI flattens the pyramid of hierarchy, he observed.
Shaw expressed concerns over the ‘Gen Z’ being reclusive, being heavily connected to social media etc., and not able to withstand the slightest of impediments they come across. Kapur felt that elders owe a greater responsibility in helping Gen Z in making right choices in their lives that they are lacking in.