Cinematic Rebellions: AI and the New Auteur

With my talk, I aimed to engage the audience in the dialogue surrounding the use of AI in the film and TV industry as of June 2026. From its potential to write, reshoot scenes, and even generate films with the director’s input, I aimed to encompass as many aspects of the modern filmmaking industry as possible to help the audience understand both its creative potential and problems that it poses to the film and TV industry today.

Further, I delved into the history of cinema, the French New Wave movement (with films such as Hiroshima mon amour and 400 coups), to illustrate its movement towards the director as having full creative control as an auteur of the production, the camera as their kind of pen: a point of comparison for the emerging AI movement in cinema. I thus discussed the how AI can enable a creative to incorporate heavy special effects, set design, et cetera with a relatively small budget, as did the UK-based Iranian filmmaker Ash Koosha in his film Dreams of Violets, which became the first film entirely made with AI to be selected for a major film festival (Tribeca).

To conclude my talk, I used my own background as a professional actor and filmmaker to speak to the way I had explicitly used AI in my film Lily Flowers: A New Chivalry, which employed its “slopaganda” to create a prop that one character uses to slander his enemy in the film. I also displayed the film’s poster that I had designed with a professional graphic artist and the help of AI prompts to alter certain images from the film to correspond to its absurdist and theatrical tone. Because of my intimacy with the industry, I also provided news of current events, production companies and artists beginning to conceptualise methods of using AI in film in different ways. Such an example is A24’s recent June 2026 deal with Google to conduct research on the means of filmmaking AI could provide the sensational indie film studio and distribution company. Lastly, I covered the laws being implemented by Hollywood, like by SAG-AFTRA and the Academy (Oscars), to regulate the use of AI in film.

Questions surrounding AI’s obscure future in the Film and TV business ask whether it can be an enabling tool to create things that were never before possible, but also whether it is a threat to the artistic integrity of filmmaking through its dubious means of plagiarism and synthesis of other films and performances. It is an incredibly frightening, but also an exciting time for the future of cinema, and hopefully my talk helps to add nuance and inform the audience about the complexities that AI presents to us filmmakers as we turn to the next chapter of the moviemaking process.