Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been a subject portrayed in movies, from ground-breaking films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to the robot character Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and the lovable Robbie in Forbidden Planet (1956). In recent times, we have seen the artificial intelligence HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the replicants in Blade Runner (1981). Artificial intelligence has been portrayed as malevolent in The Matrix (1999), The Terminator (1984) and I Robot (2004), and somewhat more sympathetically in AI (2001), Short Circuit (1986), Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014). Film often reflects society’s fears, hopes and anxieties, and AI is no exception.
Fiction is now blending into reality as artificial intelligence starts to impact our side of the silver screen. AI is used at various stages of the film-making process, from pre-production to production, post-production, marketing, and distribution. AI can generate a synopsis or treatment to develop story lines, and in principle could even write a full script, though how watchable this would be is a matter of debate. Certainly, AI can be used to identify story structure issues and break down a script into areas showing characters, locations and special effects. In pre-production, AI can easily generate storyboards of the kind once drawn meticulously for directors like Alfred Hitchcock, who himself was a trained draughtsman. AI can even be used to help with location scouting, by analysing images to look into issues that may affect production, such as logistics and local weather.
There are further uses for AI in film production. It can be used for editing, visual effects, and sound design in post-production. Once a film is finished, generative AI can be used to produce marketing material. Generative AI can do a lot more than just write parts of a script. Its image and video-generating tools can construct entire movie scenes, animations or even a whole film. Director Hooroo Jackson used 17,000 AI-generated images to stitch together a 2023 black and white film experimental called Window Seat, which admittedly bombed at the box office but was the first fully AI feature film. It has obvious flaws such as non-existent lip-syncing, but you can watch and be the judge. The technology continues to evolve, and by September 2025 there are already a slew of movie-making tools like Veo, Sora, Runway, Dream Machine, Minimax and Kling. The clips from these tools are already a lot more impressive than those that were possible in 2023.
Script writers are one of the many areas of the creative industries concerned about copyright infringement by AI companies, who routinely scrape content from written texts, film and audio files to train their large language models (LLMs). Even the death of an actor need no longer be the end of their film-making career. James Dean, Ian Holm and Carrie Fisher have already appeared in movies after their deaths, as has Christopher Reeve in a controversial manner. Even an AI-generated Audrey Hepburn appeared in a chocolate commercial in 2013, though with the permission of her family.
Actors and writers have noted the incursion of AI into their industry with concern, In 2023 the unions Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) held strikes in Hollywood, disrupting film production and resulting in agreements to some level of protection of actor’s image rights and limitations on the use of AI-written content.
Despite misgivings, there is little doubt that AI will continue to work its way into more and more aspects of the movie industry. The tools that actually produce video are improving rapidly, and are already almost unrecognisable from the early ones that were around in 2023. With traditional film costs reaching as much as $15,000 a minute, plus the costs of crew and film equipment, it is clear that filmmakers and studios will be keen to investigate its use. Besides the actual film, it can be seen that there are myriad possible uses of AI right across the film production process, from scripts to marketing.
Film has always held up a mirror to our society. AI is now starting to move beyond a mere film construct within a movie and starting to actually become part of the film-making process itself. Hopefully, the real-life ending of this development will not be as apocalyptic as the one that the film industry has often portrayed.
