‘Backrooms’ Director Roasts AI: ‘I’d Make It Disappear Forever’

Adario Strange
June 5, 2026

MAN AND ROBOTS: A weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work.

🏀 NBA’s Flagrant AI Foul

1. The NBA Finals have captured everyone’s attention as the New York Knicks attempt to win their first championship in 53 years against the San Antonio Spurs, led by 7-foot-5 center Victor “The Alien” Wembanyama. This year’s Playoffs even inspired an AI anime mini-series called Attack on Wemby, mirroring the style and plot of Attack on Titan. But that might be where the AI fun stops for this year’s NBA contest, as ESPN fumbled the media ball by rolling out an AI-generated image that infuriated many fans. The image was supposed to show former Spurs guard Tony Parker during a past Finals win, but instead of using the real photo of the athlete, an AI-generated replacement face of Parker appeared. The offending AI image quickly went viral, with many fans asking why the perfectly usable original image hadn’t been used.

Subsequently, an ESPN spokesperson confirmed to Front Office Sports that the image was AI and was part of “an experiment” to liven up images for the broadcast. ESPN also used AI to display an altered version of NBA legend Bill Russell at another point in the broadcast.

You’ve Been Warned: The only reason this use of AI didn’t go off perfectly is because the team working on the spots was sloppy. But that won’t last long. Generative AI imagery and animation continue to improve, and so too will the people using it. So what was an outrage this week will next year probably go completely unnoticed. That may be a good thing for ESPN, but fans might want to know when they’re viewing real images from sports history versus realistic AI art. It should also be noted that ESPN is under the Disney umbrella, where, until very recently, there were plans to integrate OpenAI’s Sora AI video into the Disney+ app before the deal fell apart. It appears that, with or without OpenAI, Disney plans on forging ahead with AI content on its platforms.

🤖 Anthropic’s Emergency Alert: The Sky Is Falling

2. “What should we do? If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures. We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.”
–Jack Clark, Co-Founder, Anthropic & Marina Favaro, Anthropic Research

🎬 Backrooms Director on AI

3. The story of how the box office hit Backrooms made it to theaters is the perfect tech-meets-Hollywood tale of an idea born in Internet chatrooms, nurtured on YouTube, and now boasting $140 million at the worldwide box office since its debut last Friday. But just because the film was directed by a 20-year-old tech-forward Kane Parsons, that doesn’t mean he’s automatically on board with the AI video movement. In fact, quite the contrary.

“Absolutely not,” said Parsons when asked by CBS Mornings if he was planning to embrace AI. “For me the whole point of doing what I’m doing, art is a way of processing life. That’s inherently what it’s supposed to be for most people. I don’t see the value in outsourcing any element of that. And when I’m looking at someone else’s project, if I see an element of the environment has been like, you know, they use [AI] generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, it just shuts off the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details. Because I would assume if they’re willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they could make an arbitrary choice with literally anything.”

But that wasn’t a one-off. The young director has thought a lot about AI. “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me,” Parsons told The Australian. “We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop. That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot. I’m interested in using that iconography in art – not using AI to make the art itself, but examining what it represents.”

Trend Spotting: Parsons’ anti-AI sentiments are becoming the norm among Gen Zers, who are increasingly opting for analog experiences that cannot be manipulated, faked, tracked, or easily duplicated. The AI industry got another signal of this trend from the recent college graduation speeches, during which, if AI was mentioned positively, many students booed the speaker, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Part of that negative reaction is likely tied to the widespread use of AI chatbots by students to cheat their way to a degree. A recent study from Berkeley revealed that 26% of daily AI users used AI to cheat. Whether it’s concern about AI taking their jobs, cynicism toward AI’s purported benefits, or just a normal cultural cycle back to wanting arts that are more old-school craft and less digital, what was supposed to be a boom of AI enthusiasm led by Gen Z is instead often being led by Millennials and their corporate bosses.

🎥 Marty On AI: Fuhgeddaboudit, I’m Using It

4. “Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve. I utilized 3D with Hugo and de-aging technology for The Irishman. Now, with this [AI] tool, I can share what I’m visualizing more clearly and efficiently to my creative team—the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer—for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence. I recently tested this out on a scene and the ability to visualize and immediately share the storyboard was creatively freeing.”
–Martin Scorsese, director, GoodFellas, The Departed, via Black Forest Labs’ website

🔈 Suno’s Billions and the New Music Industry

5. If you’re a music purist and were hoping AI-generated music might just, somehow, go away, I’ve got bad news for you. Suno, one of the leading platforms for creating AI-generated music, just landed a new $400 million funding round, valuing the company at $5.4 billion. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures, Bond Capital (led by longtime Internet trend spotter Mary Meeker), IVP (an investor in Anthropic, Perplexity, Coinbase, Netflix, Kalshi, and Superhuman fka Grammarly), Forerunner (investors in the Oura ring health tracker startup valued at $11 billion), Quiet, and Alkeon.

“In recent months, we’ve seen Suno become part of culture in ways that continue to surprise us. Family members are turning text threads, group chats, and inside jokes into songs. People are writing songs for birthdays, graduations, and even work events. Viral trends helped propel Suno to #1 in the App Store’s Music category in dozens of countries,” said Mikey Shulman, the co-founder & CEO of Suno, in a statement revealing the new funding. “In the coming months, we’ll begin rolling out our first music model developed in partnership with the music industry. We believe there’s a huge opportunity to create new experiences for fans while helping artists reach audiences, build community, and unlock new creative and economic possibilities.”

What It Could Mean: While the movie business, news media, and book publishing are all struggling to come to grips with how, or whether, to allow AI to become a legitimate part of their industry, the music industry has already decided that AI music will live alongside human musicians. To some degree, I think this is a byproduct of the overall decline in music sales, the inability to make streaming payouts work for most artists, a decline in terrestrial radio’s impact, and the creeping corporate consolidation the music business has always faced. The rise of the “360 deal” meant that many artists increasingly leaned on live performance tours and merch they could sell directly to fans, as the economics of the music business gradually drained profits for all by the elite superstars. As AI-generated music continues to permeate the charts and streaming services, the share of publishing and music royalty payouts seems destined to shrink further into the hands of the major publishers, who control distribution.

In an ideal artist-friendly world, this disruption would weaken the major labels and pave the way for an indie-music revolution, be it human-made or AI-augmented. But we’re not in that artist-friendly world, and the major publishers won’t sit idly by and let AI music become someone else’s cash cow. Expect a serious transformation in the music industry, where A&R focuses less on musical acumen and more on which artists can bring something special to live performances (singing/rapping/instrumental talent being last on the list). If there’s one industry that can take immediately relevant notes from what’s happening to the music business due to AI, it’s probably book publishing.

Like albums, books are wholly contained worlds that don’t necessarily require large teams or, in the case of fiction, exhaustive research. But when it’s time to sell even an AI-generated book, the question will now hinge on: Does the author have the charisma and extemporaneous facility with public speaking that helps sell a book? No more dry, anti-social, monosyllabic scribes crawling out of their writer’s den to begrudgingly market the book to the public. No, book publishers will require entertaining humans, beyond the page. This is what I predict things will begin to look like in the music business, book publishing, and perhaps other arenas of creative endeavor as humans are literally forced to distinguish themselves from aesthetically pleasing algorithms in the marketplace of mainstream consumption. It’s not the future many of us want, but it’s what is emerging in real time. ✍︎