Hideo Kojima says he’s no longer interested in AI

Hideo Kojima has moved sharply away from the upbeat view of generative AI he voiced in 2025, a reversal that lands at the center of a larger fight over who gets credit for creative work. After appearing in an AI-generated Prada promotional short linked to filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, Kojima now says he is no longer interested in AI and does not think he will live to see the technology create art.

The shift is notable because Kojima had sounded far more open to the technology just months earlier. In October 2025, he described AI as a tool for handling “tedious” work, lowering costs and helping production move faster, even calling it a kind of “friend” in game creation. By June 6, 2026, that tone had changed. Kojima said AI might eventually create art, but he did not expect to live long enough to see it happen.

The backlash around the Prada piece helps explain the turn. Fans reacted negatively to Kojima’s involvement in the generative-AI video, which used an AI likeness of him for a fashion promotion tied to an art installation. The criticism was not just about taste. It reflected a wider unease in creative industries, where generative AI is often marketed as efficient and cutting-edge, yet is increasingly viewed by artists, writers, game developers and designers as a threat to authorship, originality and the value of human-made work.

Kojima’s retreat from AI also resonates because of the scale of his influence. As the creator behind Kojima Productions and one of the most recognizable voices in modern game design, his public skepticism carries weight far beyond a single campaign. He had already been connecting his work to concerns about technology’s grip on daily life around the release of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, which came out on June 26, 2025. In interviews around that launch, he said he worried about people being too connected and about the internet and AI hijacking human decision-making, with the game itself reflecting anxieties about overconnection and the loss of chance.

That context gives his latest comments more force than a simple about-face. Kojima now sounds less like a technophile weighing productivity gains and more like a creator reconsidering how much automation can enter the studio before it starts to flatten identity, dilute brands and sideline the human uncertainty that gives art its edge.