This week's New Yorker carries an article by Joshua Rothman about what artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to do to the arts, broadly speaking. I'd like to focus on one particularly creepy novelty that AI has recently empowered: the ability of three guys (one in the U. S., one in Canada, and one in Poland) to produce fully realized short movies without actors, sets, cameras, lights, or any of the production equipment familiar to the motion-picture industry. The collaborators, who call themselves AI OR DIE, use only prompts to their AI software to do what they do.
I spent a few minutes sampling some of their wares. Their introductory video appears to show what a camera sees while it progresses through a mobile-home park, into one home, where the door opens, another door opens, and finally a piece of toast appears, floating in the air. Another one-minute clip shows a big guy pretending to be a karate-type expert knocking down smaller harmless people. If all the characters in that clip were creations of AI without any rotoscoping or other involvement of real humans or their voices, we are very far down a road that I wasn't aware we were even traveling on.
Software from a firm called Runway is not only used by AI OR DIE, but by commercial film production companies in mainstream films as well. But so far, nobody has produced an entire successful feature film using only AI. But it's only a matter of time, it seems to me.
Rothman quotes the AI OR DIE collaborators as saying how thrilled they are when they can have an idea for a scene one day, and then start making it happen the next day. No years in production hell, fundraising, hiring people, and all the other pre-production hassles that conventional filmmaking entails—just straight from idea to product. So far, most of what they've done are what Rothman calls "darkly surrealistic comedies." If the samples I saw were representative, it reminds me of an afternoon I spent at Hampshire College in the 1990s, I think it was, in Massachusetts, where a screening of student animations was held.
Early in the development of any new medium, you will come across works that were made simply to exploit the medium, without much thought given to what ought to be said through it. The short animations we saw that afternoon were like that. The students were thrilled to be able to express themselves in this semi-autonomous way. Chuck Jones, the famous Warner Brothers animated-film director, once said that animators are the only artist who "create life." Most of the time they let their thrills outweigh their judgment. A good many of the films we saw back in Massachusetts that afternoon were in the category of the classic "Bambi Meets Godzilla." This film, which I am not too surprised to learn was No. 38 in a book of fifty classic animated films, at least meets the Aristotelian criteria of unities of action, time, and place. There is one principal action, it happens over less than a 24-hour period, and it happens in only one location. We see the fawn Bambi, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, browsing peacefully among flowers to idyllic background music. Suddenly a giant foot—Godzilla's, in fact—drops into the frame and squashes Bambi flat. End of story. Most of the other films were like that: a silly, stupid, or even mildly obscene idea, realized through the painful and tedious process of sole-author animation.
Just as our ability to manipulate human life technologically has led us to face fundamental questions about what it means to be human, the ability to only a few people to digitally synthesize works of art that formerly required the intense collaboration and technology-aided actions of hundreds of people will lead us to ask, "What is art?" And here I'm going to fall back on some classical sources.
Plato posed that the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty are things that lie at the roots of the universe. According to theologian and philosopher Peter Kreeft, art is the cultivation of beauty. Filmmaking is a type of storytelling, one in which the way the story is told plays as much of a role as the story itself. And it's obvious that AI can now replace many more expensive older ways of doing moviemaking without compromising what are called production values. The authentic quality of the AI OR DIE clips I saw would fool anybody not thoroughly familiar with the technology into thinking those were real people and real mobile homes.
But AI is in the same category as film, cameras, lights, microphones, technicians, and all the other paraphernalia we traditionally associate with film. These are all means to an end. And the end is what Kreeft said: the cultivation of beauty.
I think the biggest change that the use of AI in film and animation is going to make will be economic. Just as the advent of phototypesetting obsoleted entire technology sectors (platemaking, Linotyping, etc.), the advent of AI in film is going to obsolete a lot of technical jobs associated with real actors standing in front of real scenery and being photographed with real cameras.
Will we still have movie stars? Well, is Bugs Bunny a movie star? You can't get his autograph, but nobody would deny he's famous. And he's just as alive as he ever was.
Before we push the panic button and write off most jobs in Hollywood, bear in mind that live theater survived the advents of radio, film, and television. It was no longer something you could find in small towns every week, but it survived in some form. I think film production with real actors in front of cameras will survive in some form too. But the economic pressures to use AI for more chunks of major-studio-produced films will be so immense that some companies won't be able to resist. And if the creatives come up with a way to make a film that cultivates beauty, and also uses mostly AI-generated images and sounds, well, that's the way art works. Artists use whatever medium comes to hand to cultivate beauty. But it's beauty that must be cultivated, not profits or gee-whiz dirty jokes. And unfortunately, the dirty jokes and the profits often win out.
Sources: Jonathan Rothman's "After the Algorithm" appeared on pp. 31-39 of the Sept. 1-8, ,2025 issue of The New Yorker. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on "Bambi Meets Godzilla," and the software company Runway. Peter Kreeft's ideas of art as the cultivation of beauty can be found in his Doors In the Walls of the World (Ignatius Press, 2018).
