As AI has already found a broad level of acceptance among mainstream filmmakers, it’s nice to know the world isn’t coming to an end because of it. Sweep aside the stupid and repetitive arguments (c.2005: Which is better, film or digital?) and you’ll see that it’s just the latest vehicle to barrel down the road of endless progress. The smart folks are using it to tell stories more creatively and efficiently, while the resistors are falling off the raft as they did on every previous occasion. Personally, certain applications of AI have been very helpful in my work. Having lived through the upheaval of technical change twenty-five years ago, I assure you that embracing it is a much healthier response. But the skeptics and hard-liners needn’t worry. In less than a decade something else will come along to supplant AI and they’ll have a whole new thing to rail against.
Invented in the 1820’s, photography didn’t gain acceptance as a fine art until nearly a hundred years later. During that interim, the same kind of fruitless arguments were mounted against it: It’s mechanical…soulless…devoid of humanity…it threatens the status quo and cheapens the march forward. I can’t imagine subscribing to those notions anymore than I can imagine AI not being part of the popular approach.
Change may be the rule, but it’s surely not the ruler. It’s also not the enemy; inertia is. Every meaningful advance in cinematography has been met first with suspicion, then resistance, then adoption. Thankfully, AI is well along that final path. And there’s no turning back…