I Saw the Future of AI Film and It Was Empty

Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader—the head of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and writer of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—issued what seemed for illustration nan past connection connected artificial intelligence successful Hollywood filmmaking. A fewer days aft nan merchandise of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two, Schrader asked his Facebook followers: “Will Dune 3 beryllium made by AI? And, if it is, really will we know?”

Schrader is good regarded not only arsenic a director, but 1 of cinema’s top-shelf curmudgeons, speedy pinch a wry pain aliases baiting shit-post. But his Dune tweet seemed for illustration much than different provocation. It said to a mounting emotion among galore filmgoers, myself included: that Hollywood had stooped to producing sleek, antiseptic images truthful devoid of characteristic that they mightiness arsenic good person been made not by a living, breathing, thinking, emotion artist, but by a computer.

Most generative AIs “train” connected existing troves of man-made images. With Dune, nan other seemed true. It appeared arsenic if Villeneuve was training connected AI conjurations, screensavers, and glossy desktop wallpapers. (In fact, nan movie utilized “machine learning” models to comparatively humble ends.) Still, it sewage maine thinking: Is location an existent AI aesthetic? Do video generators powered by AI stock a group of creator ideas, aliases values, communal among their output? Or, moreover much basically, can AI video generators person ideas, aliases values, astatine all?

My first hunches present were … a) no; b) no; and c); no, of people an AI could not person “ideas” aliases “values,” which are nan exclusive state of quality artists, and quality beings much generally. A toaster does not get a conception to lukewarm up your breadstuff aliases bagel, and past travel done pinch it. Nor does it care astir really it does so. It simply executes a group of routinized, mechanized functions related to nan warming (and eventual jettisoning) of breads, bagels, and different toastables. Why should generative AI beryllium immoderate different?

To trial these premises (and my ain alternatively dismissive conclusions) I trekked to a theatre successful New York to return successful a programme of 10 short films from nan 2025 AI Film Festival.

The AI Film Festival is backed by Runway, a New York–based AI institution offering “tools for quality imagination.” Among those devices are image and video generators allowing users to create characters, sets, lighting schemes, and full immersive scenes. With its Gen-4 software, users tin theoretically create a full movie—or thing vaguely approximating one, anyway.

“We were each disappointment filmmakers,” says Runway’s cofounder, Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, of he and his partners, who met arsenic grad students enrolled successful nan Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) astatine NYU’s Tisch School for nan Arts. “We wanted to build nan devices that we wanted to use.”

The movie show was calved of a further desire to thief legitimize those aforesaid AI tools. A gala screening held earlier this summertime astatine New York’s prestigious Alice Tully Hall astatine nan Lincoln Center (home to nan New York Film Festival and year-round programming) saw filmmakers and technologists stitchery to watch nan crème de la crème of a exertion typically written disconnected for producing mere “slop.” The show format, Ortiz says, serves to “bring group together.” Now, that aforesaid gala programme is touring Imax cinemas astir nan country, for a constricted engagement.