Final yr, filmmaker Paul Schrader—the director of Blue Collar, American Gigolo, and First Reformed, and author of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—issued what appeared just like the final phrase on synthetic intelligence in Hollywood filmmaking. A number of days after the discharge of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Half Two, Schrader requested his Fb followers: “Will Dune 3 be made by AI? And, whether it is, how will we all know?”
Schrader is effectively regarded not solely as a director, however certainly one of cinema’s top-shelf curmudgeons, fast with a wry burn or baiting shit-post. However his Dune tweet appeared like greater than one other provocation. It spoke to a mounting feeling amongst many filmgoers, myself included: that Hollywood had stooped to producing glossy, antiseptic photographs so devoid of character that they may as effectively have been made not by a dwelling, respiratory, pondering, feeling artist, however by a pc.
Most generative AIs “practice” on present troves of synthetic photographs. With Dune, the other appeared true. It appeared as if Villeneuve was coaching on AI conjurations, screensavers, and shiny desktop wallpapers. (In reality, the movie used “machine studying” fashions to comparatively modest ends.) Nonetheless, it bought me pondering: Is there an precise AI aesthetic? Do video mills powered by AI share a set of inventive concepts, or values, frequent amongst their output? Or, much more principally, can AI video mills have concepts, or values, in any respect?
My preliminary hunches right here have been … a) no; b) no; and c); no, after all an AI couldn’t have “concepts” or “values,” that are the unique province of human artists, and human beings extra typically. A toaster doesn’t get a notion to heat up your bread or bagel, after which observe by way of with it. Nor does it care about the way it does so. It merely executes a set of routinized, mechanized features associated to the warming (and eventual jettisoning) of breads, bagels, and different toastables. Why ought to generative AI be any completely different?
To check these premises (and my very own somewhat dismissive conclusions) I trekked to a theater in New York to absorb a program of 10 brief movies from the 2025 AI Movie Pageant.
The AI Movie Pageant is backed by Runway, a New York–based mostly AI firm providing “instruments for human creativeness.” Amongst these instruments are picture and video mills permitting customers to create characters, units, lighting schemes, and complete immersive scenes. With its Gen-4 software program, customers can theoretically create a complete film—or one thing vaguely approximating one, anyway.
“We have been all pissed off filmmakers,” says Runway’s cofounder, Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, of he and his companions, who met as grad college students enrolled within the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch College for the Arts. “We needed to construct the instruments that we needed to make use of.”
The movie competition was born of an extra want to assist legitimize those self same AI instruments. A gala screening held earlier this summer time at New York’s prestigious Alice Tully Corridor on the Lincoln Heart (residence to the New York Movie Pageant and year-round programming) noticed filmmakers and technologists collect to look at the crème de la crème of a expertise usually written off for producing mere “slop.” The competition format, Ortiz says, serves to “convey individuals collectively.” Now, that very same gala program is touring Imax cinemas across the nation, for a restricted engagement.