Artificial entertainment

When Joshua Sikora isn’t teaching about movies, he’s making his own. Grounded, Sikora’s animated short film, tells the story of an astronaut who crashes onto an alien planet and builds an escape craft. Think The Martian but with a claymation aesthetic. Sikora, a professor of cinema at Houston Christian University, draws a storyboard for every shot by hand. But he uses artificial intelligence to automate some of the actual animation. That doesn’t mean it’s not his work.

“It has my fingerprints on it at every stage of the process,” Sikora said.

Like Sikora, many filmmakers are using artificial intelligence to automate tedious aspects of production and enhance the quality of their projects without breaking the bank. As the technology improves, they wonder where to draw the line. If audiences would watch them, AI-made movies could easily become mainstream entertainment. But can computers tell stories as well as humans?

While AI-made movies aren’t a reality yet, the technology has become a significant part of the editing process for many projects. For example, the creators of Playdate, starring Kevin James, used a tool from Flawless AI to remove some profane dialogue so the movie could get a PG-13 rating. The creators of A24’s The Brutalist used AI to make the actors’ Hungarian accents sound more authentic. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, filmmakers automated a painstaking animation technique called rotoscoping. In both Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Here starring Tom Hanks, filmmakers used AI to make some of the actors look much younger.

According to Josh Sikora, AI allows filmmakers to push past boundaries and create quality content on the cheap, a boon for low-budget and independent operations. “The time and talent that it took to do visual effects previously meant that you were usually pretty limited in what kinds of effects a smaller production could leverage,” Sikora said. According to a January report on AI from research firm McKinsey & Co., AI could cut around $10 billion in original content spending by 2030.

The report also noted that “AI may be the first technology with the potential to enable creation of content at higher production values outside of the large professional studios if tools improve sufficiently.” If filmmakers need big-­budget studios less and less, that could create more opportunities to make original films, rather than franchise-driven sequels and spin-offs. For viewers, that would provide more variety.

But some filmmakers worry AI could eventually replace the creative process.

Last year, a Dutch producer created an AI-­generated actress called “Tilly Norwood.” The SAG-AFTRA labor union responded with an announcement opposing the use of nonhuman performers. “It creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry,” the statement read.

Under the union’s 2023 agreement with movie studios, there are some limitations on the use of AI. For example, actors must consent to their likenesses being replicated, and they must receive compensation. A studio can use fully computer-generated characters in a production. But the studio must notify the union and “acknowledge the importance of human performance in motion pictures and the potential impact on employment.”

AI is already being used to replicate both the quick and the dead. Actor Val Kilmer, who died in 2025, will reportedly star in an upcoming film called As Deep as the Grave thanks to generative AI. In a video that went viral in February, Irish director Ruairi Robinson created a generated clip of actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt sparring. Actor Matthew McConaughey has moved to protect himself from AI replication by securing trademarks on certain videos and audio clips including his iconic phrase, “Alright, alright, alright.”

But experts disagree about whether AI really will threaten artists. Audiences might not pay for generated movies, argues Anthony Palomba, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in the business of media and entertainment. “Nothing else matters until people really start clamoring for this stuff,” he said.

According to a 2024 survey from Deloitte, 7 out of 10 people would rather watch a movie or show written by a human than a computer. Only 22% think generative AI tools could create better content than a human.

But Alex Chung, director of the School of Cinema, Art & Design at George Fox University, can envision a future in which generated films become mainstream. “I think there’ll still be a place for analog filmmaking by humans, but it might just be super niche and maybe more expensive,” Chung said.

Despite Hollywood’s fears, Chung doesn’t believe the demand for human-made filmmaking will ever disappear completely. “There is something unique about human creation that can’t be captured by machines,” he said. Still, he believes there’s room for using AI with discernment.

Joshua Sikora views AI as a valuable tool for parts of the process that have the least amount of human input: “If we can plug AI into those spaces and then let human artists be driving that from story to finished composition, I think it opens up a lot of doors.”