The ‘Ice Cream Man’ AI Controversy, Explained
AI is a touchy subject for creatives. As companies become more and more aggressive about normalizing AI in our everyday lives, despite the very clear negative impacts that it has on cognitive development, the environment, and the brutal RAMageddon that the tech industry is going through, consumers are, thankfully, pushing back against it. When AI is discovered in a product, video game, or even film, the pushback is swift and loud. Even three pieces of AI art that found their way into Late Night With the Devil(2024) were enough to kill interest in that film. Now, it’s Ice Cream Man’s(2026) turn.
Eli Roth is no stranger to controversy. His films have been accused of being misogynistic, racist, gratuitous, and done in poor taste. However, he openly embraces his brash, my-way-or-the-highway style that made him respected in some horror circles, even if his movies vary wildly in quality. But you could never accuse him of peddling slop. That is, until Ice Cream Mandecided to shove AI in viewers’ faces in the worst way possible.
How Did Eli Roth’s ‘Ice Cream Man’ Use AI?
To be clear, there’s no denying that Ice Cream Manutilized AI in its production. Dark Half, an AI visual effects production company, was featured in the film’s credits.
It’s not exactly hard to see where. Ice Cream Manis a demented horror movie about a small suburban town that is visited by a mysterious and creepy ice cream truck. The ice cream man himself is definitely unnerving, acting a lot like Art the Clown from Terrifier(2018), and he is more than happy to give ice cream to all the neighborhood kids. But after the kids eat his ice cream, they become homicidal monsters, murdering all of the adults in town in excessively violent ways that are perfectly at home in an Eli Roth film.
During the film’s 89-minute runtime, two sequences appear that are clearly made with AI. The first is an animated sequence directly inspired by 1920s Fleischer-style animation, and the second details who the Ice Cream Man is. They’re sequences that are ultimately inconsequential to the story, and the film wouldn’t have been any better or worse with or without them. However, knowing that they’re made with AI, justifiably, rubs people the wrong way.
Why Is ‘Ice Cream Man’s Use Of AI Controversial?
In my opinion, the use of AI in any film should be controversial, and it does my cold, dead heart well to see people call out its use even before the film’s August 7th release date. But the controversy is more complicated than AI being present in Ice Cream Man,mostly because Eli Roth tried to hide it.
In an interview with Polygon in the lead-up to Ice Cream Man’s release, Roth discusses the process he took to create the Flesicher animated sequence. Roth said: “I have an animation background, and I drew it.” He then goes on to detail the process of making it and hand-drawing the frames and loop cycles used to bring the sequence to life. The one thing he neglected to mention was that AI helped bring the sequence to life, drawing a whole lot of attention to what exactly he meant when he said that “…I had some animators help kind of make it a little more fluid.”
When pressed about Dark Half’s involvement in the film and if AI was actually used to make those animated sequences, Roth’s response was pretty deflating. Once again speaking to Polygon, he admitted that, “I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film.” The issue isn’t that he used AI, though that in and of itself is a pretty glaring problem; it’s that he allegedly lied about it and tried to pass off generative AI as his own work when, by generative AI’s very nature, it clearly isn’t.
How Does This Affect Eli Roth Going Forward?
Naturally, many people online were offended by Roth’s response, and now, some audiences deem him “untrustworthy” and “deceitful” because of his use of and comments about AI.
Consumers, by and large, don’t like AI, and many directors, like Guillermo del Toro, have sworn off ever using the technology. At the same time, major organizations, like the AMPAS, have forbidden any work featuring AI-generated content from ever winning an Oscar. Roth might’ve misspoken, as he claims. Still, many of his fans rightly feel betrayed that he seemingly tried to deceive them in the first place. As a result, all of his future films will likely be accused of featuring generative AI, even if they don’t.
3.7
An idyllic summer town descends into madness when an ice cream man serves kids sweet delights with horrifying results.
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