AI-Generated Cinema

Examples of short films and online videos created with AI have become commonplace. There are now even AI film festivals, complete with their own movie awards. In a way, this is nothing new for the art of cinema, since creative artists were the first to experiment with the new “moving pictures” technology at the threshold of the twentieth century, while most others ignored it. As Marshall McLuhan so perceptively noted throughout his writings, those who grasped deeply the meanings and potentialities of a new medium were not the scientists who invented it, nor the general public, but rather artists and younger people who tap into its possibilities for opening up novel vistas almost instinctively. But the fact that a movie can now be generated with just a few clicks and prompts to an AI raises immense questions that may even negate the McLuhanian perspective: Who is the film’s creator? What do audiences glean from AI-generated cinema? This chapter looks at such questions. As one of the creators of the movie The Matrix, Andy Wachowski so aptly observed, the screen engages us in a tiresome construction of meaning. Will this constructionism continue in the Age of AI?