In the third episode of “Creative Dialogues,” an interview series produced by the motion picture division of AI generator Runway, multimedia artist Claire Hentschker fears that AI will commoditize the artistic process to the point where art becomes homogenized, recede into a kind of derivative resemblance.
“Do you get this increasingly narrow average of existing things?” she asks. “And then – as this keeps averaging – will it all just be a trickle?”
Those are the questions I kept asking myself Wednesday at a screening of the top 10 finalists at Runway’s second annual AI Film Festival, which are available on demand on the Runway website as of this morning.
Runway held two premieres this year, one in Los Angeles and a second in New York. I attended New York’s, which took place at the Metrograph, a theater known for its arthouse and avant-garde bookings.
I am happy to report that AI is not rushing into the future… not yet at least. But a deft director’s eye—the human touch—makes a definite difference to the effectiveness of an “AI movie.”
All of the films submitted to the festival incorporated AI in some form, including AI-generated sets and animations, synthetic voiceovers, and bullet time special effects. None of the data looked at the level of what state-of-the-art tools like OpenAI’s Sora can produce, but that’s to be expected given that most of the submissions were finalized earlier this year.
Indeed, it tended to be obvious – sometimes painfully so – which parts of the films were the product of an AI model, not an actor, cameraman or animator. Even the otherwise strong scripts were sometimes let down by the overwhelming artificial intelligence effects.
Take, for example, Johans Saldana Guadalupe and Katie Luo’s “Dear Mom,” which tells the story of a daughter’s love affair with her mother — in the daughter’s own words. It’s a tearjerker. But an LA freeway scene with all the telltale weirdness of AI-generated video (eg warped cars, weird physics) broke the spell for me.
The limitations of today’s AI tools seemed to weigh down some films.
As my colleague Devin Coldewey recently wrote , control with production models—especially those that create video—is elusive. Simple matters in traditional filmmaking, such as choosing the color of a character’s clothing, require solutions because each shot is created independently of the others. Sometimes even solutions don’t do the trick.
The resulting disconnect was on display at the festival, where several of the films were little more than tangentially related vignettes tied together by narrative and a soundtrack. Carlo De Togni and Elena Sparacino’s L’éveil à la création showed just how boring this formula can be, with slideshow-like transitions that would make a better interactive storybook than the movie.
The “Where Do Grandmas Go When They’re Lost?” by Léo Cannone? also falls into the vignette category — but it triumphs despite that thanks to a heartfelt script (a kid describing what happens to grandmothers after they pass) and an extremely strong performance from the child star. The rest of the audience seemed to agree. the film received one of the liveliest applauses of the night.
And for me, that really sums up the festival in a nutshell. Human contributions—not AI—often make the difference. The sentimentality in a child actor’s voice? That sticks with you. AI generated backgrounds? Less.
That was certainly the case for the festival’s Grand Prix winner Get Me Out, which chronicles a Japanese man’s struggle to recover from the psychological toll of immigrating to the US as a young child. Director Daniel Antebi depicts the man’s panic attacks with the help of AI-generated graphics – graphics that I found less successful, ultimately, than the cinematography. The film ends with a shot of the man walking across a bridge, just as the street lights crossing the pedestrian lane flicker one by one. It’s elemental – and beautiful – and must have taken years to capture.
It is very possible that genetic artificial intelligence will one day be able to recreate scenes like this. Perhaps cinematography will eventually be replaced by prompts — a casualty of the ever-growing datasets (albeit with a troubling copyright situation) on which startups like Runway and OpenAI train their video-generating models.
But that day is not today.
As the screening ended and the award recipients marched to the front of the theater for a photo, I couldn’t help but notice the cameraman in the corner capturing the whole affair. Perhaps, instead, AI will never replace some things, like the humanity we humans long for.
