{"id":11615,"date":"2025-08-20T13:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T13:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/11615\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T13:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T13:04:09","slug":"i-went-to-an-ai-film-festival-screening-and-left-with-more-questions-than-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/11615\/","title":{"rendered":"I Went to an AI Film Festival Screening and Left With More Questions Than Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader\u2014the director of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and writer of Martin Scorsese\u2019s Taxi Driver\u2014issued what seemed like the last word on artificial intelligence<\/a> in Hollywood filmmaking. A few days after the release of Denis Villeneuve\u2019s sci-fi blockbuster Dune<\/a>: Part Two, Schrader asked his Facebook followers: \u201cWill Dune 3 be made by AI? And, if it is, how will we know?\u201d<\/p>\n

Schrader is well regarded not only as a director, but one of cinema\u2019s top-shelf curmudgeons, quick with a wry burn or baiting shit-post. But his Dune tweet seemed like more than another provocation. It spoke to a mounting feeling among many filmgoers, myself included: that Hollywood had stooped to producing sleek, antiseptic images so devoid of personality that they might as well have been made not by a living, breathing, thinking, feeling artist, but by a computer.<\/p>\n

Most generative AIs \u201ctrain\u201d on existing troves of man-made images. With Dune, the opposite seemed true. It appeared as if Villeneuve was training on AI conjurations, screensavers, and glossy desktop wallpapers. (In fact, the film used \u201cmachine learning\u201d models to relatively modest ends.<\/a>) Still, it got me thinking: Is there an actual AI aesthetic? Do video generators powered by AI share a set of artistic ideas, or values, common among their output? Or, even more basically, can AI video generators have ideas, or values, at all?<\/p>\n

My initial hunches here were \u2026 a) no; b) no; and c); no, of course an AI could not have \u201cideas\u201d or \u201cvalues,\u201d which are the exclusive province of human artists, and human beings more generally. A toaster does not get a notion to warm up your bread or bagel, and then follow through with it. Nor does it care about how it does so. It merely executes a set of routinized, mechanized functions related to the warming (and eventual jettisoning) of breads, bagels, and other toastables. Why should generative AI be any different?<\/p>\n

To test these premises (and my own rather dismissive conclusions) I trekked to a theater in New York to take in a program of 10 short films from the 2025 AI Film Festival.<\/p>\n

The AI Film Festival is backed by Runway, a New York\u2013based AI company offering \u201ctools for human imagination.\u201d Among those tools are image and video generators allowing users to create characters, sets, lighting schemes, and whole immersive scenes. With its Gen-4 software, users can theoretically create a whole movie\u2014or something vaguely approximating one, anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were all frustrated filmmakers,\u201d says Runway\u2019s cofounder, Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, of he and his partners, who met as grad students enrolled in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU\u2019s Tisch School for the Arts. \u201cWe wanted to build the tools that we wanted to use.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film festival was born of a further desire to help legitimize those same AI tools. A gala screening held earlier this summer at New York\u2019s prestigious Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center (home to the New York Film Festival and year-round programming) saw filmmakers and technologists gather to watch the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of a technology typically written off for producing mere \u201cslop.\u201d<\/a> The festival format, Ortiz says, serves to \u201cbring people together.\u201d Now, that same gala program is touring Imax cinemas around the country, for a limited engagement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader\u2014the director of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and writer of Martin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,595,289,290,18,19,17,610,327,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-11615","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-machine-learning","16":"tag-movies","17":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}