Gregg Araki has no interest in letting artificial intelligence replace the people on his set. The director, an icon of New Queer Cinema whose first feature in 12 years opened in theatres on July 31, told Deadline he is "not a big supporter" of AI when it comes to substituting for actors and writers — but finds the technology genuinely useful in the editing room.

The distinction matters because Araki actually relied on AI post-production tools to rescue a scene in his new film I Want Your Sex. The sequence was shot on a mini golf course next to a freeway, and the audio was, by his account, a mess. AI cleanup tools salvaged the dialogue track that location noise had nearly buried (Deadline).

I Want Your Sex is an erotic comedy thriller co-written by Araki and Karley Sciortino. Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy, a dominatrix; Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, her assistant. Charli XCX appears as a character named Minerva, and Mason Gooding also features in the cast. The film is Araki's eleventh to screen at Sundance and premiered at the 2026 festival in January (Deadline).

Magnolia Pictures set the wide theatrical release for July 31 (Deadline). The Los Angeles Times profiled Araki ahead of the opening, noting the 12-year gap since his previous feature and his standing as a defining figure of New Queer Cinema, the early-1990s movement that brought openly LGBTQ stories to independent American screens (Los Angeles Times). NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer interviewed Araki and Hoffman on July 31 as the film reached audiences (NPR).

Araki's position on AI — embrace the tools that fix technical problems, reject the tools that replace creative labour — lands at a moment when the industry is still working out where the boundary sits. The writers' and actors' strikes of 2023 made AI protections a central demand for both guilds, and the language in those contracts remains the reference point for nearly every conversation about the technology in film production.

What gives Araki's take its weight is the specificity. This is not a filmmaker opining in the abstract. He used the tools, named the scene, and explained the problem they solved — a dialogue track recorded next to a highway. The position is practical, not ideological, and it comes from someone who has just put a film through the full pipeline from festival premiere to theatrical release.