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What Star Wars Reveals About Embracing AI in Creative Work
When Lucas combined practical and digital effects, he created movie magic. Here's how the same approach can work with AI.
Kelsey Ruger
October 29, 2024
After the article: A couple issues ago I talked about tools for research and note taking, where I introduced NotebookLM. I was curious what the AI podcast hosts would come up with for this article. Let me know your thoughts. Take a listen.
Recently I was re-watching "Empire of Dreams" a documentary about the making of Star Wars. Something struck me that I hadn't really though about before: the story of Star Wars's production is actually a template for how disruptive technologies enter creative fields. When people talk about Star Wars, they usually focus on its impact as a film. But the really interesting story is about what happened behind the scenes. It's a story that's playing out again right now with AI.
In 1977, George Lucas did something that seems obvious in retrospect but was controversial at the time: he decided to use computers to help make movies. This sounds unremarkable now. But at the time, it was like suggesting you could use a dishwasher to cook dinner.
The special effects veterans hated this idea. And they weren't wrong, exactly. These were seriously talented people who'd spent decades perfecting their craft. They could do things with models and practical effects that no computer of the time could match. But they were making the classic mistake that experienced people make when confronted with new technology: they were judging it by what it could do at the time, not by what it could become.
What's even more interesting is that the people who ended up working with Lucas weren't the established experts. They were young hackers who were basically making things up as they went along. This turns out to be a pattern. The people who push technology forward are often outsiders who don't know what they're not supposed to be able to do. (This is why it's often a mistake to dismiss new technologies because they're not as good as existing ones. That's like dismissing a 5-year-old because they're not as smart as an adult. The important question isn't how good something is, but how good it could become.)
Why weren’t the veterans wrong? There was something special about practical effects. What they got wrong was assuming it had to be either/or. The real magic of Star Wars came from combining practical and digital effects in ways that played to the strengths of each. This is exactly what's happening now with AI. If you replace "practical effects artists" with "writers" or "artists" and "computer-controlled cameras" with "large language models," you get a pretty accurate picture of the current debate about AI in creative fields. Just as with Star Wars, we're seeing two predictable but opposite mistakes: veterans dismissing the new technology entirely, and newcomers thinking it will completely replace traditional methods. Both are wrong.
The veterans are wrong because they're framing the power of AI incorrectly. The newcomers are wrong because they're underestimating how much human craft matters. Here's the thing about creative work: it's not just about the output. It's about understanding what makes something good in the first place. The Star Wars sound designer, Ben Burtt, didn't use a scuba regulator for Darth Vader's breathing because it was high-tech. He used it because he understood what sound would create the right emotional effect.
This points to something important about how new technologies enter creative fields. They don't usually replace the old ways entirely. Instead, they become new tools that get combined with traditional methods in ways no one expected. I saw this same pattern in programming. When high-level languages first appeared, assembly language programmers dismissed them as toys. Now we use both, depending on what we're trying to do.
The future probably won't belong to pure AI or pure human creativity, but to people who figure out the best ways to combine them. Just as the best special effects today use both practical and digital techniques, the best creative work of the future will probably use both human craft and AI.
This suggests a general principle: when a new technology enters a creative field, don't ask "Will this replace X?" Ask "What new things does this make possible?" The most interesting uses of AI won't be doing exactly what humans already do, just faster or cheaper. They'll be doing new things we haven't even thought of yet. Just as Star Wars didn't just improve special effects – it created whole new kinds of movies that wouldn't have been possible before.
So if you're working in a creative field, the question isn't whether to use AI or not. The question is how to use it in ways that amplify rather than replace human creativity. The people who figure this out first will probably be the ones who shape what creative work looks like in the future.
And if history is any guide, they probably won't be the existing experts. They'll be outsiders who are too naive to know what they're not supposed to be able to do.
P.S. If you’re really a fan of Star Wars and storytelling another great documentary to check out is Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed a History Channel program that explores the mythological and historical references in the Star Wars series.