I teach a course on AI and filmmaking at USC’s Faculty of Cinematic Arts, and recently, reasonably than planning every session effectively upfront, I’ve been structuring the category the evening earlier than. I’ll browse platforms like X, Substack, and YouTube, deciding on essentially the most provocative articles and video clips to current the next morning.
It’s a testomony to how shortly artificial intelligence’s relationship to filmmaking is evolving: Every week brings new—often startling—developments.
The subsequent morning in school, my college students and I debate the ethics, the aesthetics, and the storytelling modifications happening in these collaborations with AI.
And we’re not alone: All through Hollywood, everybody—aspiring actors and filmmakers, stars, screenwriters, and studio execs—appears to have a tackle what’s coming subsequent. However I feel three tendencies particularly are going to be sizzling matters of dialog at this 12 months’s Oscars events.
Nothing uncanny about this clip
In February 2026, a 15-second AI-generated video clip of Tom Cruise battling Brad Pitt on a burned-out freeway overpass went viral.
Relying on the viewer, the video elicited both admiration, outrage, or existential hand-wringing.
Created by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson by way of a generative-AI instrument referred to as Seedance 2.0, the video marked yet another milestone within the propulsive development of AI instruments.
Seedance 2.0—which was developed by ByteDance, the Chinese language firm behind TikTok—is now one of many many AI tools available to create short-form video clips. However not like most AI-generated movies, Pitt and Cruise don’t look creepy, uncanny, or animated within the clip, which nearly completely mimics live-action footage. The looks of two A-list stars in a reasonably life like scene created by a comparatively unknown director utilizing stolen likenesses jolted the business.
A quick clip that includes AI-generated avatars of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise surprised the movie business.
The backlash was swift. Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that the video was generated from a dataset that almost definitely contains Disney’s copyrighted characters. The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, pointed to the video’s “blatant infringement” of the actors’ likenesses, in addition to their voices.
“SAG-AFTRA stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by Bytedance’s new AI video mannequin Seedance 2.0,” the guild wrote in a statement. This follow, the guild added, “undercuts the power of human expertise to earn a livelihood,” whereas disregarding “regulation, ethics, business requirements and fundamental rules of consent.”
At school, after watching the video, we explored the ethics of utilizing somebody’s likeness with out permission, the challenges dealing with actors who construct careers primarily based on their distinctive capacity to embody characters, and what the long run holds for our understanding of appearing.
If filmmakers can immediate pretend actors to ship exact performances, the place does that depart human actors?
In with the outdated
Since 2023, the skyline of the Las Vegas strip has been dominated by an illuminated orb referred to as the Sphere: an leisure advanced that includes a 360-degree LED display screen protecting 160,000 sq. toes (14,864 sq. meters). The Sphere not too long ago surpassed 2 million tickets bought for a reimagining of the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
The movie, which premiered in August 2024, was shortened, its shade was enhanced, and it was stretched to broaden throughout the inside of the dome. AI was used to switch the imagery from the movie’s unique, modest facet ratio to the large dome. This required producing new imagery across the edges of the unique photographs in what’s referred to as “AI outpainting.” The expertise was additionally deployed to spice up the unique movie’s decision and to reinforce sure scenes.
Some critics fretted that this pretty radical augmentation of the unique basic would offend viewers. As an alternative, it has drawn them in droves to the Sphere, the place they’ve been prepared to shell out between US$100 and $200 per ticket.
Not dangerous for a film a couple of lady from Kansas made in 1939.
Given the resounding success of The Wizard of Oz, consultants anticipate producers to plumb the movie archives for other potential hits and improve them with AI earlier than screening them in venues as different as IMAX theaters and Cosm, one other 360-degree dome with areas in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta.
Or AI can merely be used to create materials that was by no means accomplished for a historic movie.
Actually, The New Yorker recently profiled AI media entrepreneur Edward Saatchi, who’s working to recreate and reincorporate misplaced footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 characteristic The Magnificent Ambersons. Whereas Welles was in Brazil capturing a documentary, executives at RKO Radio Footage reedited the movie with out his approval after a poor preview screening. They reduce round 45 minutes, changed the unique ending with a happier one, and destroyed many of the footage that had been eliminated.
Saatchi’s concept is to construct a dataset that features the present movie, in addition to scripts, notes, photographs, and even new performances by actors. Then he plans to make use of his AI platform, Showrunner, to create new scenes from this information.
Whereas Saatchi hopes to honor the director’s inventive imaginative and prescient by producing the movie he initially supposed, his efforts open up some thorny questions.
Is it acceptable to take an present paintings and revise it with out the creator’s enter? Isn’t there one thing sacrosanct a couple of movie, the intentions of the director, and the performances of the actors in a movie’s unique kind? To what extent ought to these questions be missed if refashioning outdated films will introduce them to new audiences?
Fewer alternatives?
There’s additionally an undercurrent of tension in my lessons. What is going to occur, my college students usually surprise, as soon as they graduate?
They’re anxious that inside a 12 months or two, AI may have changed entry-level movie business jobs, from idea artists to apprentice-level editors, earlier than they’ve even had an opportunity to enter the workforce.
They’ve purpose to worry.
In 2024, the Animation Guild published a sobering report claiming that by 2026, “inventive employees can be dealing with an period of disruption, outlined by the consolidation of some job roles, the alternative of present job roles with new ones, and the elimination of many roles fully.”
A few of these predictions have borne out: 41,000 jobs in film and television have disappeared in Los Angeles County alone over the previous three years.
However I’ve tried to counter the onerous statistics with some tales of considerate practices.
For instance, filmmaker Paul Trillo on the AI studio Asteria has talked about how he seeks to maintain artists on the middle of the method. When he detailed the corporate’s work on a music video for the singer-songwriter Cuco, he was eager to focus on the variety of artists engaged on the challenge. Sure, AI instruments have been used. However they have been built-in in a approach that changed the tedious work, not the inventive follow.
“Slightly than eradicating [artists] from the method, it really allowed them to do much more so a small workforce can dream quite a bit greater,” Trillo explains on the finish of the video.
In January 2026, the administration consulting agency McKinsey printed a report that largely echoes Trillo’s constructive outlook. It forecasts extra adoption of AI all through the business. However it additionally factors to ways in which the expertise may result in totally different sorts of labor and open up new prospects.
For instance, as AI-generated scenes develop into commonplace, studios will want technicians who know methods to mix actual footage with digitally created worlds. And as AI lowers the price of producing polished movies and reveals, it may permit extra “micro-studios” and impartial filmmakers to create professional-quality content material.
On the similar time, the report additionally quotes a studio govt who concedes that AI may characterize “a extra important platform shift than we’ve got ever seen earlier than in our business.”
So it’s no surprise my college students, together with different critics, commentators, and business professionals, are nervous.
Nevertheless, from the place I stand, I’m satisfied that the business will climate this radical disruption. It’s tailored to large modifications up to now: the addition of sound within the Twenties, the risk posed by videotape within the Eighties, and streaming within the 2000s.
In the long run, individuals will all the time crave new, artfully informed tales. Whereas the filmmaking instruments and job market could also be in transition, that core want for storytelling isn’t going away.
Holly Willis is a professor of cinematic arts on the University of Southern California.
This text is republished from The Conversation beneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.
