Does Generative Artificial Intelligence Represent Reality in Filmmaking?

The user edwardtracy on the social media site Reddit is a “BAFTA winning and Emmy-nominated writer, director, and producer,” who you might have never heard of. Renowned for creating the television shows Fonejacker and Facejacker in the U.K. in the mid-2000s, Tracy went on to collaborate with several artists including Banksy, Dizzee Rascal, and Riz Ahmed on a few independent and short projects. All of that, however, is in the past. Currently, Tracy is gaining semi-prominence on Reddit, for creating bite-sized Artificial Intelligence (AI) videos exploring a vivid spectrum of interests, to showcase the limitless potential for AI generated films.

Of Tracy’s expansive oeuvre on Reddit, there is a post from 10 months ago on the r/aivideo subreddit – a forum dedicated to discussing AI videos – that stands out. Titled, “My first documentary using AI. A lot of work but fun to make!”, the film is a three-minute-long ordeal about fictional deep-sea monsters and an equally made-up island of Mu-Tang that acts as a haven for these fantastical beasts. The film, if one could call it that, is crafted entirely using generative AI software, barring the music, which is credited to the “talented” Scott Buckley. Tracy’s video is ludicrous, rife with tacky and inconsistent animations, which are signifiers of any (un)successful AI-generated video, of which there are countless in a rapidly growing field.

My first documentary using AI. A lot of work but fun to make!
byu/edwardtracy inaivideo

While the ethical debate of gen AI usage for filmmaking is a conversation in itself, what makes Tracy’s video even more controversial is it’s self-appointed designation as a documentary. Across time, documentaries–big and small, long and short, linear and non-linear, hybrid and traditional–have remained bound together with one flickering commonality: the pursuit of truth. Documentary filmmaking is a tool for those looking to turn a mirror onto life itself. It is unclear why Tracy would market his video as a documentary, especially when there is no apparent reason for doing so. He could just as easily call it a mockumentary, given the short’s use of non-fiction conventions to tell a saga about Godzilla-like sea monsters.

The market for gen AI videos about bizarre and otherworldly occurrences is rapidly increasing, without any interference by documentary filmmakers. To use the documentary tag appears to be a means to confound a viewer who is unaware of the video’s origins. It reads in itself as a harmless attempt at amateur filmmaking and click-baiting, but Tracy’s video is in fact a signifier of a more sinister trend for the future of documentary filmmaking. This trend is typified by one of the comments on Tracy’s video, which reads, “some unassuming fool is gonna think this is real, lol.” Over the past year or so, there is a great possibility that all of us have played the role of the unassuming fool for some film at some point in time.

If you’ve been keeping up with recent documentaries, there’s a good chance that you’ve witnessed gen AI in action. Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain (2021) and Andrew Rossi’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022) are both documentaries about prominent personalities that came under the scanner over the past few years for their usage of  gen AI. The films fabricated portions of their voiceovers (or in Rossi’s case, the entire voiceover) by feeding their respective protagonist’s voice into an AI software that could then generate any conceivable sentence in the uploaded voice. The practice is eerily similar to having posthumous, non-consensual, and subservient access to your artist in the dubbing studio. (Seen in films like Eternal You.) And while both parties claimed to having acquired the green light from the estates of Bourdain and Warhol respectively, there is still a moral dilemma present.

The reception to both docs was strikingly different, with Roadrunner being largely slammed for its AI usage for a person who unflinchingly believed in the authentic and The Andy Warhol Diaries being appreciated for its inventive approach towards immortalizing Warhol. The difference rests in the method and transparency of use.

In Roadrunner, Neville inserted a single line of dialogue, “Tell me, are you happy?” with gen AI recreating Bourdain’s voice for dramatic effect. While Neville failed to disclose AI involvement and avoided commenting on it in press interviews, Rossi was extremely open about how recreating Warhol’s voice was key to his process, perhaps in part by having learned a few lessons from the Roadrunner controversy months before. Both The Warhol Diaries and its press/marketing materials openly trumpeted the use of new technology to (re)create Warhol’s voice. In an interview with James Kleinmann of The Queer Review, Rossi remarks how having Warhol’s voice was integral in humanizing the mechanical public appearance of Andy Warhol. The irony in this interaction for Rossi to use a machine to humanize Warhol is vivid but Rossi’s usage allows viewers to understand AI as an assistive tool to the art of filmmaking, which is only uplifted by Rossi’s public adoption and acceptance of the software—and, perhaps, Warhol’s own willingness to embrace commercial tools in the creation/distribution of his own pop art.

The difference in treatment of and towards Neville and Rossi further alludes to the ethics of AI usage resting in its appropriate disclosure to the audience. People want to know what they are subscribing to. However, both documentaries were still accepted as “documentaries” owing to the archival nature of their footage and the attempt to document someone’s story, and while the usage of AI in both cases was to manufacture an element that could not exist without creative licence, it helped that the idea was auditory. Audiences were left to decide for themselves if gen AI was any different from a celebrity performing narration in the subject’s “voice.” This is understandably different from Tracy’s usage of gen AI where the images themselves have been artificially constructed entirely by a machine that trains itself and sources information from products of real human labour.

Currently, gen AI films haven’t permeated the mainstream and are often used as tools by emerging filmmakers to get their voice across. Unfortunately, at the same time, the usage of the technology has increased rapidly with major brands including Coca Cola and Tata using generative AI software to create major ad campaigns. The more AI images that populate our screens, the harder it gets to distinguish artificial from authentic–and more gen AI means that fewer paid opportunities exist for filmmakers who might work on commercials to offset the costs of documentary filmmaking. And the normalization of AI usage in peripheral industries will only heighten the propensity of the tech’s usage in mainstream filmmaking. In the cases of Tracy’s video, the gen AI as a maker of monsters ensures that the fiction is obvious—but the technology is there to create convincingly authentic fabrications of so-called real-world events.

Furthermore, beyond the ethical dilemma of AI-usage, there is also the concern regarding the detrimental impacts of AI on our environment. Scientists estimated the power requirements of AI data centres globally at 460 terawatt-hours in 2022. This would put data centres as the 11^th largest electricity consuming entities on our planet, between the nations of Saudi Arabia (at 12^th) and France (at 10^th). This number could only have increased in the past three years, with the usage of gen-AI exponentially increasing in that time. With the majority of the electricity to power these data centres being sourced from fossil-fuel based power plants, the unsustainable model of gen AI and data centres is further a cause for grave concern.

These facts, combined with the replacement of human labour with a machine that exploits human knowledge, make Tracy’s video about deep-sea monsters more malicious than what it appears to be. It works to counteract the societal additives of documentaries, of which there are countless. Documentary films inform, challenge, reflect, and document everything from political ideologies to views on extra-terrestrial life to the exploration of regional cuisines in far-off countries in real time and retroactively. Processing this information and using a generative-AI platform negates all authenticity from this practise. Where are the humans in these videos of human life? In this sense, the usage of gen AI in filmmaking does not represent liberation, as independent filmmaking movements previously have, but instead is nothing short of an inherent retreat from reality. A manufactured pandemic that requires an authentic boycott of the artificial.