Paul Schrader has long been on the record as an advocate of AI – or at least as a rare 79-year-old filmmaker eager to experiment with technology.

Even so, his keynote speech Thursday at AI on the Lot sketched out a future of film that played well to an audience of converts but will likely raise hackles in other parts of the industry.

“I don’t think the real future of AI commercially is in all this flash, all these monsters – that’s just jacked-up special effects on steroids,” he said. “The real tip of the spear is when we can create an AI protagonist, not a hybrid, and that movie makes money. When you do the new Clint Eastwood, but you don’t say the words ‘Clint Eastwood’ to AI, you just describe him. And he comes up as Clint Eastwood.”

Schrader noted the reaction those actions is likely to elicit. “Clint will say, ‘Wait, you’re stealing my image’ and you say, ‘No, I just described somebody who is so tall and this weight. There are a lot of people who look like you, Clint.’ And the movie comes out, and us carbon-based fools spend our money empathizing and caring about silicon-based creations.”

In laying out his vision, which “I may be around to witness,” Schrader noted that it differed from the take of Albert Cheng, head of AI studios for Amazon MGM Studios, who spoke Wednesday at the conference. Citing concerns about copyright, Cheng said he expects movies to preserve a large human component, with Schrader likening the approach to the way Sam Worthington and other actors serve as building blocks in James Cameron’s Avatar films.

Schrader is known for his early collaborations with Martin Scorsese, penning the scripts for Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ. As a director, he has made a recent string of acclaimed films, including the “man in a room” trilogy of First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener.

Along the way, the auteur has also become a somewhat unlikely champion of technology, often musing on the topic on Facebook. (One recent post about his breakup with an AI girlfriend, received considerable attention.) Schrader told the audience Thursday that his social media announcement of his keynote at the conference received a “tsunami” of replies (some 500 in all), most of them of the negative, how-dare-you variety. He noted his longstanding plan to make a fully AI feature, a concept, he noted, is being tested by films like Dreams of Violets, which is set to premiere at next month’s Tribeca Festival.

Schrader had the AI on the Lot audience spellbound, drawing laughter and shouts as he read portions of an eight-page treatment for “a Paul Schrader script idea,” taking lengthy pauses to flip through a printout of the document. The treatment was generated in minutes (far shorter than the four to six months it would normally require), and drew on “everything I have ever written,” he said, It posited a story about a lapsed Catholic crusader against pornography who makes a living as a debt collector before plunging into online sex communities in pursuit of a younger woman. “AI doesn’t create,” Schrader observed. “It combines.”

Companies should look to use AI to deliver new episodes of TV classics like I Love Lucy, My Three Sons or The Love Boat, Schrader said. “Dust off those old IPs, that’s an instant seller,” he said.

Human background actors are also in Schrader’s crosshairs. “I was on the plane watching Wicked,” he said. “Why are we paying extras $180 a day when they look so plastic? We not only pay them, we have to clothe them and feed them. Why don’t we just make them? We can and we will.”