It feels like every article in the trades lately has been about the demise of Hollywood. How fewer projects are getting green-lit, budgets are shrinking, and the impending doom of artificial intelligence.

Things sound especially dark on the generative AI side, as alarmists make bold claims that human actors and filmmakers will soon be a thing of the past. 

But the truth is, no one has a crystal ball. And while fear mongering may sell clicks, recent history has taught us that people are very poor predictors of the future. Especially when a new technology is involved.

It wasn’t long ago I was reading countless think pieces on the impact virtual reality would supposedly have. How it would destroy filmmaking and the theatrical experience for good.

“Why will anyone ever go to the movies again if they can just watch at home on their headsets?” they said. Turns out, VR (at least in filmmaking) was a total dud, outside of a few very specific outliers. 

Don’t get me wrong, the theatrical business is hurting badly. I’ve witnessed many of my favorite theaters close over the years. And I don’t doubt that more closures are around the corner.

Even as the eternal optimist that I am, I don’t see a world in which we have more theaters in the future than what we did in the past. We just don’t live in that reality any more.

But all of this started way before AI, VR, the Hollywood strikes, Covid, or anything else that we’ve speculated about over the past 5-6 years.

The real threat to the movie going experience is not any one technology or event. It’s the fragmentation of attention, and the optionality of entertainment. 

It’s hard to convince anyone to buy overpriced tickets and popcorn when they have to sit in a dark room for 2 hours without their social media. A sad, but true reality…

Even if it’s a movie they really want to see, they can easily just wait a couple weeks to stream it for free at home. And by then, maybe they’ve forgotten about it. Instead, they’re binging a new podcast or lost on a vertical series that has sucked them into the algorithm.

That’s the issue movies (and theaters in particular) have been up against for years.

Just as video games, social media, YouTube, streaming, verticals, etc. have stolen eyeballs away from the silver screen, AI will accelerate this trend at an incredible rate.

We haven’t even scratched the surface with regard to AI addiction.

At this point we all know people who have become truly dependent on Chat GPT and other LLMs. Virtually unable to function without them.

Don’t get me wrong – those tools have a time and place. I use some of them daily, just not for filmmaking. But I have to make a very conscious effort to use them the right way, and to not become dependent on them.

I would never use AI (just as one example) to write this article. It would defeat the point of forcing me to think critically, give my brain a workout, and communicate things in a way that may be imperfect, but is at least honest.

While AI may excel in some areas, it falters in many others. Making that distinction is crucial.

Just this week, a salesperson was trying to convince me to purchase a high ticket product I was interested in, but their entire back and forth discussion with me was clearly run through ChatGPT. For that reason alone, they lost the sale. It was impersonal, synthetic, and dull.

Had that salesperson been a human about it with me, they would have likely had my business. Even if their pitch wasn’t perfect.

I have to believe on some level this person had become hooked on AI. Convinced that because it could do one thing very well, it could do everything very well.

And he is far from the only one. So many people seem to have been lured by the promise of AI solving everything.

I’ve met producers that no longer read scripts, placing their full trust in the opinion of an LLM. Or directors using them to come up with shot lists instead of using their own brain.

In almost all of these instances, the end result is lower productivity, lower quality, or both.

Like social media, AI apps have one goal: Keep you using them. The more “helpful” they are to you in a personalized way, the more addicted you will become.

But the danger isn’t just watering down the quality of output from creative minds. It’s the distraction that it poses to regular audience members.

How could any movie – even one in your favorite genre with your favorite star – compete with a machine designed to hijack your attention and intelligence?

If we thought social media was bad, we haven’t seen anything yet.

That’s why I am less concerned with AI directly hurting the filmmaking process, and more concerned with its impact on audiences.

As a filmmaker, sure – it’s shocking to see generative AI fight scenes with Brad Pitt on a rooftop. Or the transformation of a sunny day into a snow storm without the use of a VFX artist.

These disruptions are very real. But perhaps not transformative in the way we might imagine.

From a purely artistic standpoint, using AI to replace the creative process generally doesn’t appeal to artists. For most of us, it’s not about avoiding the messy middle, it’s about jumping into the mud and getting our hands dirty.

When I make a film, the best part (as challenging as it can be) is sitting in a room and giving my brain a workout to try to problem solve while writing. Or working out ideas with human actors in rehearsal. Being on set and finding inspiration from a location and changing the scene around that. That’s the fun part. 

It’s why most filmmakers love being on set. As stressful as it can be, it brings us to life. The challenge of pushing ourselves to our limits, being creative within an extreme set of limitations, and collaborating with likeminded people is everything.

Nothing can replace that, and no traditional filmmaker wants to lose that. 

That doesn’t mean AI generated films will cease to exist, but they will be created by a completely different archetype. One that is more concerned with having made something, than getting to make something. And that’s perfectly fine too.

Personally, I am not at all interested in making an AI movie – it entirely defeats the point for me. 

But I also am not threatened or upset in any way by those who use AI to prompt out ideas. I genuinely don’t see AI films as a competitor to traditional films – I see them at minimum as a separate genre, but perhaps an entirely different medium – adjacent to what we do, but not a direct replacement.

It’s also worth pointing out that 99% of filmmakers out there (including the vast majority of those who reject AI), are in fact using AI themselves. Even without realizing it.

AI is woven into every video editing software, every search algorithm, every sound cleanup tool. But there is a big difference between using it to eliminate meaningless tasks, and using it to eliminate the most important task – your own original thought process.

I will never pretend to know where AI is headed, and anyone that claims to is being disingenuous.

I am certain though, that there are elements in every great film that will never be replicated without humans.

How could there ever truly be an AI movie star? Fans that are obsessed with their celebrity of choice have it somewhere in the back of their head that they might actually meet that person someday.

As delusional as that may be, that glimmer of hope makes that star compelling on a level that a fully computer generated face never could be. It’s not about whether it looks realistic, it’s about whether people feel an actual connection to the person on screen.

The same goes for using AI to write a story, script, dialogue, or anything else that needs a human touch. It’s one thing to have ChatGPT write an instruction manual for you. But a very different thing to connect on an emotional level that is so specific it could only be human.

AI image generators were some of the first visual tools to emerge in the generative space. Yet all this time later, art galleries are still filled with portraits made hundreds of years ago using egg whites for paint and feathers for brushes, with fingerprints visible on lines blended by hand.

The human connection to the artist matters as much (or more) now than it ever has.

Similarly, AI has been able to write music fairly competently for a while now. But no one is paying hundreds of dollars to go to Coachella to see an OpenAI model perform. They want the human in front of them. Bonus points if something goes off the rails and they have a story to tell after.

I don’t mean to downplay the disruption that AI will cause, as it will be massive. My point is simply that it will likely take a very different form than most seem to believe. 

It’s not a question of whether AI prompting will replace filmmaking as we know it. It won’t. Just as video didn’t actually kill the radio star.

More audio is listened to today (podcasts and audiobooks) than ever before in history. And I’m sure we could all find countless articles from decades past proclaiming that audio-only experiences would have been long dead by now.

And in the same way that audio based formats shifted from relative obscurity to a resurgence with new delivery methods (AKA podcasting on the internet), I think the film business will experience a similar movement.

10 years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if most major cities have only a few movies theaters left in them. They may become more like playhouses than multiplexes.

But just because one exhibition format is changing (or even dying) doesn’t mean filmmaking itself is going away. Just as there are still artists making paintings with oil on canvas, there will still be filmmakers making their movies using traditional means.

These filmmakers will never be able to control the supply and demand dynamics for their art. But they will always have the choice to keep making stuff regardless of the outcome. 

And while fewer traditionally made films may be produced each year, those that do get made may be some of the best we’ve ever seen. They will be made as an antidote to increasingly synthetic world we are living in, and much like live theater today, will be seen as a more pure artistic expression.

And if we’re lucky, sometime down the road, whether it’s in 5 years or 50, movies will have their own “podcast” moment, just as audio did. A new technology combined with a shift in demand may propel analog movies to reach audiences in some new way, through some new medium. Something we can’t yet predict, but that we know is entirely plausible.

In the meantime, if you’re a filmmaker – don’t let any of this deter you. There have always been more reasons not to make a film than reasons to justify it. But if you are truly an artist at your core, you’ll go ahead and make your thing, no matter the odds and no matter any external forces at play. 

The point of making art is simply to experience the creative process.

And no one can ever take that away from you. 

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