Amid the flood of new sorts of artificial intelligence (AI) that have seemingly altered the digital landscape as we know it, it’s not unfathomable to be a little nervous about the future of other frontiers, particularly the realm of arts.
Uncanny, AI-generated images and videos crowd every social media feed; large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT run rampant in academia and elsewhere, composing swaths of written content within seconds; and what feels like every major corporation is shoving AI down the throats of their consumers.
As a student in the humanities, I’ve felt a little helpless, watching all these new technologies ripen, advance, and sophisticate. I often wonder whether my future as a creator could be at stake, along with that of my fellow writers, artists, and editors.
AI and its role in the arts, and especially in film, has become a hot-button topic lately, particularly due to the alleged presence of AI in not one, but three nominees for Best Picture for the 2025 Academy Awards: Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” and James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown.”
While I’d like to say that most students would agree with my reservations about AI in film, UW is certainly not a monolith, so I took to the masses. Through an online poll, I surveyed about 30 UW undergraduates from a wide variety of disciplines.
Overwhelmingly, the students expressed distrust in the use of AI in film, with over 90 percent indicating an unfavorable opinion toward it. The most recurrent concerns lay in two main avenues: a departure from human ingenuity and creativity in the production process, and the displacement of human labor for AI’s cheaper labor.
“The beauty of film/TV comes not only from the final product that is viewed, but also from the collaborative process that brings so many like-minded, imaginative individuals together, who all work so hard to create something that they are proud of,” Natalie Scholer, a second-year student, said in the survey.
Often, fears clustered around a central concern that what AI can produce always lacks a human touch.
“AI is a soulless recreation of what human creativity can and should be,” Hans Deese, a third-year student, said in the survey. “It rips the humanity out of art with gnashed teeth and leaves nothing but a disgusting, Earth-destroying mess in its wake … Seeing it used for the arts is especially demoralizing and dystopian.”
Not all respondents were so grim about AI, but fell in a more neutral zone, citing that AI could be used as a creative tool that merely expedites the film-making process.
From the student poll alone, the line between AI’s standing as a mere creative tool or a looming new (and permanent) hire for corporations felt blurred. To try to delineate the circumstances, I spoke with two people with a little more experience and expertise.
Brett Halperin, a Ph.D. candidate pursuing human centered design & engineering (HCDE) at UW, recently researched the role of AI in the 2023 Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strike.
With a background in human-computer interaction (HCI), Halperin offered a more optimistic outlook on the implementations of AI in film, assuaging many of the common anxieties that surround it.
“Many film theorists have really described how part of what makes cinema unique, relative to other art forms, is that it has always really relied on complex technology that is always evolving and changing,” Halperin said. “There’s this recursive trope of the death of cinema, yet cinema still exists today. It’s not really dying, it’s just sort of shifting concerns around technological agency.”
According to Halperin, with most large technological advancements in the film industry, like computer-generated imagery (CGI) and even the introduction of sound and color, anxieties surrounding their impacts on future filmmaking always arise.
or not use it, that creates … more agency for workers to not necessarily be as exploited by … Hollywood corporate studio[s],” Halperin said.
As long as studios and production companies are limited, and the creatives are not marginalized but remain centered in and in control of the creative process, the film industry may not suffer largely, if at all.
Both Halperin and Owens discussed the issue of transparency within this larger discussion.
“As AI keeps evolving and adapting, and as it increases in popularity, we’re going to see it a lot more in mainstream cinema, even if we don’t realize it’s there,” Owens said in an email. “Knowing a film was made with AI can … give people more of an opportunity to learn about what AI is capable of, which I feel is a net positive: you need to know what you’re dealing with in order to develop an informed opinion about it.”
While this predicted increased use of AI in film may appear dismal, daunting, and “dystopian,” Halperin suggested that things are not so dire. He emphasized that AI aids independent filmmakers with functions they would not have accessed financially otherwise. In cases such as those, no human labor is displaced. In mainstream releases, though, that could be a different story.
In “The Brutalist,” AI augments the leads’ (Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones) performances by tweaking their Hungarian accents to sound more genuine, but the poignance of performances themselves owe to the actors, not the AI.
I can’t necessarily say the same for the pitch correction in the songs of “Emilia Pérez,” though I can see that the film strove to ensure the lead actress (Karla Sofía Gascón) could be represented in every aspect of her character, as a trans woman herself.
The AI assistance in widening the motorcycle shots in “A Complete Unknown,” poses a more unsteady question about human labor displacement, one of which I myself remain unsure. A displacement of human labor does surface here.
Even while my views still skew toward unfavorable after researching for this article (though perhaps not nearly as black-and-white), I can’t deny that the presence of concern among others lends me a little hope. The anxiety around AI proves to me that many, on the whole, will care about and prioritize authentic, human craftsmanship, even as AI becomes more prominent.
“Remember what makes cinema valuable in the first place: it’s the human stories and connections,” Halperin said. “Even as all this AI anxiety runs its course, I am hopeful that it will full circle back to what really is valuable in the first place.”
Source: By Julia Kugel The Daily
