Filmmaking Is Changing, Hostility Toward AI Won’t Stop Its Progress

The Film Industry Is Changing , AI Is Driving a New Creative Era

AI is letting independent filmmakers create sophisticated films on dramatically smaller budgets, and that challenges the economics of traditional filmmaking. If filmmakers can achieve high production value for a fraction of the cost, even combining AI-assisted production with real actors, financiers may eventually ask why a project needs a $250 million budget.

That may be one reason AI filmmaking meets such resistance in parts of the established industry: it has the potential to create serious competition.

There is another issue we shouldn’t ignore. I have personally known extraordinarily talented actors with forty years in theater and independent film who never got the chance to reach a wider audience, while others with far less experience became the faces of major productions. AI filmmaking could open a door not only for filmmakers, but for actors, writers, composers and artists who have spent decades waiting for their opportunity.

Seven Years of Closed Doors

For seven years, I tried to get my original stories financed and made. I wrote treatments and scripts, developed characters and built entire fictional worlds. I used my grocery money to make seven films and distributed them worldwide using my marketing skills. I pitched my work to producers and studios in seventeen countries across Europe and North America, including Universal Studios in Hollywood, and spent roughly $3,000 doing it. My films are commercially viable. I kept knocking on doors. They kept closing.

This is the reality for countless independent filmmakers. You can have a commercially viable story, a screenplay and the determination to make a film, and none of it guarantees access to the traditional industry. Without money, connections, representation or an established name, an original idea can remain exactly that: an idea sitting on a hard drive.

That is why I question Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro. When established filmmakers dismiss AI-assisted filmmaking as fundamentally opposed to real art, I believe they cross an important line.

You can criticize AI. You can debate copyright, ethics, jobs and how the technology should be used. But you should not decide that a film is not art simply because AI was part of the process. A filmmaker’s creativity does not disappear because a new tool is used.

So what are filmmakers like us supposed to do? Accept that because Hollywood didn’t give us a budget, we’re no longer allowed to make films? Of course not.

Film institutes exist to support independent filmmakers, and they receive a share of government budgets for that purpose. But in my experience, the funding too often goes to the same well-known producers, people who already have private investors and don’t need public money. I raised this directly with the Norwegian Film Institute, and they told me they are trying to fix it. If the system won’t give us the means, we will find another way.

Original Stories, Original IP

That is why the debate over AI filmmaking needs far more nuance than the increasingly common declaration that “AI is not art” or that AI-assisted filmmaking is inherently theft.

I am not talking about taking someone else’s screenplay, characters or intellectual property. I am talking about using my own stories, my own IP, my own photographs, my own music and my own creative direction. Look at my films: I’m in them. The characters, hairstyles and looks are my designs, and some of the faces belong to close friends in the Nordic countries and colleagues.

That distinction matters. Taking another filmmaker’s copyrighted work without permission raises legitimate legal and ethical questions (see my book on media law), and that has happened in traditional filmmaking too. But an independent filmmaker using AI as one of many tools to develop an original project is a fundamentally different situation. The technology does not erase the human being behind the work.

When I make an AI-assisted film, I am not pressing a button and receiving a finished movie. I write, direct, compose, edit, generate, reject, revise and rebuild. I spend hours fixing continuity problems and visual inconsistencies. I generate shots that fail and start again. I work with imperfect tools and try to shape their output into something coherent and entertaining.

The technology is part of the production process.

The story is still mine.

The creative decisions are still mine.

And the responsibility for the finished work is still mine.

Unemployment Existed Long Before AI

People often warn that AI will cause widespread job losses and unemployment. But unemployment and job insecurity in the film industry and across many other sectors have existed for decades, long before AI became part of the conversation.

The arrival of AI is not the beginning of these challenges. It is becoming part of a much larger transformation in how industries create, produce, and operate. 

This is not an argument that every AI film is good. Every new technology produces plenty of bad work, and traditional filmmaking has never been immune to that. There are terrible films made with enormous budgets and extraordinary films made with very little.

The important question is: what has the filmmaker actually created? Too much of the current conversation skips it, as if the technology itself decides whether something can be art.

Filmmaking has never existed independently of technology. Sound transformed cinema. So did color, digital cameras, computer-generated imagery, digital editing and visual effects. AI is another technological shift.

So why does the established industry seem comfortable with some technologies and hostile to this one? Modern filmmaking already depends on enormous amounts of technology: computational cameras, sophisticated effects software, digital editing, color grading and sound. AI-driven tools are already part of marketing, audience analysis and ad optimization. As an AI engineer, I see it everywhere. So where exactly do we draw the line?

If a major studio can use AI to promote a film, analyze audiences and optimize advertising, why is an independent filmmaker using AI to create the film itself suddenly treated as having crossed a moral boundary? That doesn’t seem like a principled distinction. It seems like a question about access.

Money, Franchises and Spectacle

The economics make this even more important. A filmmaker with a $200 or $300 million budget and a filmmaker with a few thousand dollars are not operating under the same conditions. For the independent filmmaker, AI doesn’t replace a $200 million production. It may simply make production possible at all.

For seven years, my stories could have stayed scripts while I waited for someone with money and connections to decide they were worth financing. Technology has given me the chance to make them myself. That doesn’t mean the result automatically deserves an audience. The audience still has the final say, and this is where established filmmakers should be willing to compete on the thing they have always claimed matters most: the quality of the film.

Hollywood has produced extraordinary original cinema. But it has also become heavily dependent on established IP: sequels, remakes, reboots, franchises and adaptations. A successful movie becomes a franchise, a franchise becomes another sequel, an older film is remade for a new generation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and audiences clearly enjoy many of these films. But it is strange to hear independent filmmakers criticized for using new technology while the mainstream industry keeps returning to stories audiences already know. Where is the outrage about creative repetition? Why must the filmmaker with no money prove the purity of their process while the established industry monetizes familiar IP again and again?

Then there is spectacle. Christopher Nolan’s films are enormous cinematic events because he has been given the budget and freedom to make them. The IMAX photography, large-scale production and theatrical presentation are central to the experience he creates. But spectacle and story are not the same thing. A two-and-a-half-hour film does not become great because it is long, expensive or shown in IMAX. I wasn’t convinced by the casting in his Odyssey, but that’s a matter of taste. It was Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s. If some viewers found it too long or became bored, that is their judgment as an audience, and the size of the production doesn’t make that reaction illegitimate.

This is exactly why AI-assisted filmmakers should be judged by the same principle. Don’t judge the film by the tool.

Judge the film.

You can spend hundreds of millions and still make something that doesn’t connect. You can spend very little and make something people love. The budget doesn’t determine the emotional response. The technology doesn’t determine the quality. The filmmaker does. The audience does.

Theft and Plagiarism Existed Long Before AI

Anyone who treats AI as the origin of creative theft should look at film history. Accusations of plagiarism have followed traditional filmmaking for as long as the medium has existed:

• “The Shape of Water” (2017): The family of playwright Paul Zindel sued Guillermo del Toro, claiming the film closely mirrored a 1969 play and a related short story. The suit was later dismissed, but it made headlines as a celebrated, award-winning film facing plagiarism allegations.
• “Frozen” (2013): Isabella Tanikumi sued Disney, claiming the film borrowed from her memoir. The case was thrown out, showing that even a massive studio isn’t immune to such accusations.
• Quentin Tarantino: Critics have long argued that his work borrows heavily, in shots, plotlines and whole sequences, from Japanese and Hong Kong cinema. Some call it homage, others call it theft. It’s the same argument, decades before AI.
• Led Zeppelin: Multiple songs, including “Stairway to Heaven” and “Whole Lotta Love,” faced lawsuits over borrowing from earlier blues and rock musicians.

A lawsuit isn’t proof of guilt, and a dismissal isn’t proof of innocence. But these cases show that arguments over originality never began with AI. If people want to police originality, they should do it consistently, not only against tools they dislike.

I know this from experience. I left Twitter in 2019 because my white papers and articles were repeatedly copied and used without permission. In some cases, well-known people presented my work and my quotes as their own on their websites and in seminars. You don’t understand how painful that is until it happens to you. And it happened long before AI filmmaking became a debate.

AI doesn’t eliminate that system, but it potentially weakens the barrier around it.

The Audience Gets the Final Word

Perhaps the hostility toward AI filmmaking isn’t only about technology. Perhaps it’s about what happens when people who were kept outside the gates can suddenly walk through them. I don’t claim to know what is in Guillermo del Toro’s or Christopher Nolan’s minds. But I know what it feels like to spend seven years trying to get an original story made, spend thousands of dollars trying to get someone to listen, and discover that having a story isn’t enough.

For the first time, a filmmaker without Hollywood money or connections can experiment with worlds that once required enormous resources. That doesn’t make everyone a great filmmaker. It means more people get the chance to try. Some will fail. Some will make terrible films, some interesting ones, and a few may eventually make extraordinary ones. That’s how every creative medium works. The answer isn’t to keep people out. Let them compete.

If you have $300 million, make your $300 million film. If you have IMAX cameras, use them. If you can build enormous sets and hire the world’s best crews, do it. I’ll make my film with the resources I have, and then let the audience decide. Audiences aren’t stupid. They don’t need Hollywood to tell them what is entertaining, and they don’t need me to tell them either. They watch, judge, share and recommend, or they walk away. That’s the marketplace of ideas. And if AI-assisted independent films begin drawing large audiences, that isn’t evidence that cinema has died. It may be evidence that audiences want something new.

AI has not given me talent or imagination. It has given me another set of tools, and I intend to use them. You’re entitled to believe that what I create isn’t art. But your opinion doesn’t settle the question, and neither does mine. The audience gets the final word.

After seven years of being told no, I’m not going back to waiting. I have stories to tell and films to make, and so do thousands of other filmmakers who were never offered the traditional door.

We are here.

We are creating.

And we are not going away.

The future of cinema doesn’t have to belong exclusively to people who can afford the biggest budgets. It can also belong to the people who finally found a way to tell their stories.ma