From the Newsstands: This story appeared in The Eagle's December 2024 print edition. You can find the digital version here.
As generative artificial intelligence continues its rampage through college campuses and classrooms, American University included, the new technology is also beginning to infiltrate the film world.
Film students, professors and makers on the University’s campus have been grappling with the new relationship between AI and the film industry and what to make of its use.
Professor Paul Fileri, who teaches Cinema Studies, lent The Eagle his conflicting perspective.
“I always stumble on it because I’m somewhat interested in how someone will make use of this novelty,” Fileri said. “But I don’t have a desire myself to, you know, see an AI-produced world.”
One of the University’s up-and-coming filmmakers, Ace Roth, a senior in the School of Communication, explained their displeasure with artificial intelligence taking away a human’s role in film production.
“I’d rather pay a person and give them their due diligence,” Roth said. “I want every set that I work on to have a certain ethicalness that allows for real people to achieve the things they want to achieve while making movies.”
2024 has been an eventful year for AI and filmmaking. The found-footage-esque horror film “Late Night with the Devil” stirred controversy for using AI-generated diegetic title cards, though it is used briefly throughout the film and, in all honesty, is one of the film’s few interesting talking points.
“Oh, it’s just the credits or oh, it’s just the title cards... until you get to the whole movie,” Roth said when asked about “Late Night with the Devil” and whether it crossed a line, or if any use of AI is unwarranted.
Though arguments favoring the use of AI in film-making point to its fiscal benefits, the film community appears generally unified against it.
“What, they couldn’t have hired one of their starving graphic artist friends for the cost of a few vintage wide-lapeled shirts,” Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, wrote in his review of the film for RogerEbert.com.
Aidan Kaplan, a senior in SOC, discussed the public’s puzzling perceptions of AI programs in the Digital Media and Culture course.
Kaplan said that despite the growth of AI applications, “a lot of people producing film and writing and images on the internet want the public to think that [AI programs] are really advanced.”
However, they are not yet that good at producing and still require a human element, Kaplan said.
Though AI is still in its infancy, it is a monumental shift in its implementation in the modern world. For now, though, the University is still focused on keeping it out of classrooms while stuck as a bystander watching its use in film production.
“As an observer here, a moviegoer or watcher, I'm curious about this, you know, a little bit of new media technology,” Fileri said.
This article was edited by Jessica Ackerman, Marina Zaczkiewicz and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Emma Brown, Sabine Kanter-Huchting, Ella Rousseau and Nicole Kariuki.
