I Went to an AI Film Festival Screening and Left With More Questions Than Answers

Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader—the manager of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and writer of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—issued what seemed similar the past connection connected artificial intelligence successful Hollywood filmmaking. A fewer days aft the 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, however volition we know?”

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

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

My archetypal hunches present were … a) no; b) no; and c); no, of people an AI could not person “ideas” oregon “values,” which are the exclusive state of quality artists, and quality beings much generally. A toaster does not get a conception to lukewarm up your breadstuff oregon bagel, and past travel done with it. Nor does it care astir however it does so. It simply executes a acceptable of routinized, mechanized functions related to the 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 instrumentality successful a programme of 10 abbreviated films from the 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 tools are representation and video generators allowing users to make characters, sets, lighting schemes, and full immersive scenes. With its Gen-4 software, users tin theoretically make a full movie—or thing vaguely approximating one, anyway.

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

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