Seth Rogen Tells AI-Using Screenwriters to Find Another Career

Here's a fun dispatch from Cannes: Seth Rogen is not here for screenwriters using AI, and he's honestly a little baffled by the whole trend. If you didn't catch it, Rogen showed up at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival to drum up some buzz for his new animated movie, Tangles. While doing the publicity rounds, he sat down for an interview with Brut alongside creative partner Sarah Leavitt and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, and the chat turned into a (very blunt) takedown of artificial intelligence in scriptwriting.

Seth vs. the Bots

It's no secret that the AI debate has been everywhere lately—especially in Hollywood, after all the hand-wringing during last year's writers' strike. But Rogen is not buying any of the hype. His take: using AI to write scripts just doesn't make sense if you actually care about writing.

That's definitely more colorful than most celebrity answers, but Rogen kept going. If your gut reaction is to outsource the creative process to a bot, he says, then writing probably isn't for you. As he put it, if you don't want to go through the messy, frustrating, rewarding act of writing stuff yourself, 'Go do something else.' He does, after all, actually enjoy the work (wild concept, I know). 'The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing.'

The Tangles Team Weighs In

It wasn't just Rogen venting about tech taking over creativity. Sarah Leavitt, whose graphic memoir inspired Tangles, chimed in with some perspective from her day job as a creative writing professor. Her view is that AI can't replicate the actual process of figuring things out—which, for her, included a decade spent adapting her life into a story. AI can only regurgitate what you give it; it can't live through your experiences or sweat through years of drafts.

Lauren Miller Rogen tackled the topic too, saying she just doesn't see how you could possibly 'feed in' the complicated, emotional, very human journey they went through in making Tangles. She seemed pretty relieved the project stayed fully analog—no computer-generated short-cuts here.

As Rogen put it, Tangles is pure hand-drawn animation, and he seemed proud that every single frame has a 'human touch.'

Quick Breakdown: Who Said What?

• Seth Rogen: Slams the use of AI in writing; says if you don't like actually writing, you shouldn't be a writer at all. Prefers the hands-on grind of writing and creating.
• Sarah Leavitt: Asserts that AI can't match the creative process; her book took 10 years to adapt, which AI just can't replicate.
• Lauren Miller Rogen: Skeptical of how AI could ever capture the real, personal process that defined Tangles.
• Tangles itself: Zero AI, all hand-drawn–something the creators are pretty proud of.

If you're keeping track of Hollywood opinons on AI, chalk this one up for team: Please stop letting robots write our movies.