I have just discovered a short film called Katana that was made using AI. No real voice actors were used, no real filming was done. Someone planned the shots, generated images with AI, extended those images to full shots with AI, generated voices with AI, did some Photoshopping, and edited it all together. This is a short film made with AI.
And it's amazing.
In less than five years (easily) we will have a complete feature-length film made with AI. We're already most of the way there.
This calls to mind a question: what will happen to films when anyone can make one? We've already lived through a radical democratization of different things due to technological advancement. Music production, graphic design, photography, and publishing all used to be difficult or expensive to get started in. Now anyone can do them.
Publishing in particular may be the best case to look at here because of its similarity. The Web made it so that the publishing industry has been renamed "legacy media" by many. Anyone can publish without much trouble. Because of AI, we're about to live in a world where films and serial shows are trivial to produce.
We're on the cusp of a time in which films are trivial to produce. Things that you would never see in movies are about to be commonplace. There will be an explosion of content. Blockbusters will be made for thousands instead of millions. Originality will be prized again. Movies will be smaller and employ fewer people. A studio could churn out a huge number of generic movies in the space of a single production cycle.
There will be AI slop, of course, but there will also be radical originality. Independent creators will reveal the realities of real individuals, tiny little stories that, in a previous age, would have been hidden by the repeated rejections of the massively powerful studio system.
Big Hollywood will get bigger and bigger, as always, but they will also churn out more and more disposable slop. On the flip side, small creators and those with a vision will be able to execute on it, even if it's a little strange or outside of the mainstream. Passion projects will be more numerous. Smaller and more interesting films will be more available.
We're about to enter an age when film is radically democratized. The masses will be handed the ability to make films. The same way YouTube changed how TV works, film will be changed as well. For better and for worse.
Here is a playlist of five AI-generated films.
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