Ellen E Jones: AI can already create films. What it can’t create is art

Set your watch to Pacific Time and the long-heralded “AI dawn” has already arrived. In Hollywood, it’s now sometime around AI lunchtime, and the film industry’s great and good are busy picking sides in the coming robot wars. 

Among the enthusiastic early adopters there are Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky, who’s made an AI-generated YouTube series (it’s bad), and Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, who says he’s also “engaging”. But then, Soderbergh is such a confirmed gadget-head he once shot a movie entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus (2018’s Unsane; it’s pretty good, actually). More telling, perhaps, is the fact that even Martin “Marvel films are theme park rides” Scorsese has now suspended his usual purist stance to flog storyboarding software for the AI firm Black Forest Labs, while the A-list movie stars Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey have all either invested in AI startups, proselytised about its virtues, or both.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, this tech has become routine. It’s used for everything from de-aging Robert De Niro in The Irishman to turning Zendaya’s eyes blue in Dune, and earlier this year, two entirely AI-generated feature films premiered. Hell Grind is a 95-minute “live-action” supernatural samurai adventure produced by a San Francisco start-up, which premiered at Cannes – the town, not the prestigious film festival. Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute “docudrama” about the Iranian regime’s January 2026 crackdown on protesters, which was first screened at New York’s Tribeca film festival. Neither film would merit a five-star review in the Nerve – or even a three-star mention – but both were made entirely without the aid of human screenwriters, camera crew, designers or performers, in a matter of weeks, and for under $500,000; Dreams of Violets reportedly cost less than $2,000. Both also claim to represent the future of film-making. 

There are plenty of horrified hold-outs who reject this notion. Director Guillermo Del Toro, having clearly heeded the moral of his own recent Frankenstein movie, says he’d “rather die” than use generative AI. Kane Parsons, the 21-year-old director of buzzy A24 horror Backrooms, agrees, calling AI a symptom of “cultural and economic rot”. This side has the support of several venerable film institutions. Cannes – the actual film festival this time – has banned wholly AI-generated work from competition, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled earlier this year that only humans are eligible for Oscar nominations in the acting and writing categories. 

Is there a future in which this will be seen as discrimination against the likes of the world’s first AI actor, Tilly Norwood, who recently announced her upcoming feature film debut? Will we see a “#OscarsSoHuman” campaign trending on social media, just as “#OscarsSoWhite” did in 2015? 

I reached out to Ms Norwood to see what she (it?) thinks, but since “fully interactive Tilly won’t be trialling [until] September”, I ended up speaking to her human creator, Eline van der Velden, instead. “I certainly don't feel Tilly or any other AI actors that follow are being discriminated against,” said Van der Velden, a trained actor and the founder and CEO of Particle6. “We've said from day one there are three mediums here: animation, traditional live action, and the AI medium. She belongs in that third one. Honestly, I'd love for the AI medium to eventually have its own awards categories, to highlight the human creative skill involved. That's a much bigger conversation than one Academy rule, and one I think the industry is going to have to keep having.”

Certainly, with the long view of history, much of this current controversy may seem unremarkable. We know cinema has incorporated, adapted to and benefited from a constant flow of new technologies – from sound recording to CGI effects – since the medium’s inception, which was itself rooted in technological innovation. When, in 1923, Italian film theorist Ricciotto Canudo proclaimed cinema the “the seventh art”, he was adding to a traditional list of six creative forms – architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature, and performing arts/dance – which have been practised by humans since Homer first jotted down a few lines from his favourite spoken-word poem. Incidentally, Christopher Nolan’s recent “tactile realist” blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey puts him firmly in the anti-AI camp, a position he recently confirmed by comparing the tech to “a transparent [Trojan] horse, made of glass” and praising gen Z for their “very healthy scepticism” in rejecting the satiny, poreless aesthetic of “AI slop” online. 

What Homer knew as well as Nolan is that “art" is distinguished from “slop” not according to the tools used by the creator, but by the soul of the creator and the extent to which he/she/they – but never “it” – is able to invest that soul into their work. Art is an expression of our shared humanity: the means by which we transcend apparent barriers of distance and time to create soul-to-soul connection. So while AI isn’t capable of making art, and never will be, humans are absolutely capable of making slop, and always have been.

The problem – which has been correctly identified by both AI’s proponents and its detractors – is that interesting artists aren’t currently very interested in AI. Instead, it is the capitalists who’ve taken up this tool with the most violent enthusiasm. That is, the same soulless suits who’ve long headed up movie studios and media conglomerates, making decisions in order to increase profit margins by devaluing human life. (Ironically, these are the very bean counters who really could be seamlessly replaced by a line of code, but it's always someone else’s job they’re seeking to make redundant, isn’t it?)

Our urgent task, then, is not to use AI less – a barn from which the glass horse has, in any case, already bolted – but to love real art more. And, crucially, to discern the difference. That might be particularly difficult in the cinema, where a productive tension with commercial entertainment has always existed. But I happen to believe human beings have an innate ability to know art when they see it. It is an ability which can be dulled by repeated exposure to Netflix reality shows and Donald Trump Star Wars memes, yes. But it exists in you nonetheless.

How do we join the anti-slop resistance? The answer is simple and non-violent: take your kids to art galleries, talk to your friends about books, even argue with strangers on the internet about The Odyssey, if that’s your thing. Art lives because of the human beings who live through it. No artificial intelligence can ever kill that.

Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025