What is an AI film?
- Alex Iwanoff
- May 22
- 5 min read
Updated: May 28
It’s been nearly four years since AI first landed on our computers with ChatGPT, closely followed by image, sound and video generators, effectively ‘killing cinema’ and everyone’s career with it, as now you can generate a script, actors, lighting, VFX and all. Or so the internet said.
But in real life... how is it effectively changing productions today? And we’re not talking here about resuscitating actors from their graves (Val Kilmer being the first one to be fully generated for the movie As Deep as the Grave). No, we’re looking at main ways that together paint a much bigger picture of where production is actually going.
Let's go through them.
BITCOIN: KILLING SATOSHI — THE GRAY BOX AI FILM
Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi tells the story of the real-world legal saga around Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin. Casey Affleck plays Wright. Gal Gadot, Pete Davidson and Isla Fisher co-star. The script is by Nick Shenk (The Mule, Gran Torino) and the director is Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Bourne Identity).
Needless to say that this is no indie production.
The movie called for 200 locations across four continents (Antarctica, Antigua, Las Vegas, etc.). Shooting that conventionally would have cost $300 million, the producers at Acme AI & FX told TheWrap in an exclusive set visit. Instead, they converted a former car showroom in West London into what they're calling a grey box: grey walls with with X everywhere, after “blue and green tests produced subpar results”. Proxy set pieces were built for anything an actor needs to physically touch: a staircase, a motorcycle, a desk. More like a theatre piece than a movie set.
“The entire focus on the set was on our performances. It was much more like acting in a Broadway play than in the giant event film that Doug's final product will actually be”, Casey Affleck
Though many roles were kept, one main team was missing: the lighting crew. On set, only basic utility lighting was used, as it will be corrected/added/generated in post. The sets will also be added in post. They were, however, designed the "traditional way". As production designer Oliver Scholl told TheWrap, his team used renderings, 3D models and hand drawings, then fed that reference material into the AI. The environments were then generated virtually before principal photography even began.
In total, 55 AI artists are working in the post-production of the movie and the producers declined to reveal which model or AI tool they were using.
HOUSE OF DAVID — THE HYBRID
The Biblical epic premiered on Amazon Prime Video in February 2025. The second season was released on March 2026. House of David is now the clearest documented example of what a working AI-integrated production pipeline looks like inside a conventional TV show. The series has drawn over 40 million global viewers, according to Amazon MGM Studios’ press release.
And here are other numbers, because they are the story.
In season 1, 72 shots were generated using AI tools, concentrated mainly in Episode 6 "Giants Awakened", a sequence depicting the origin of Goliath, that sparked debate online about the use of AI in visual storytelling.
Midjourney, Magnific, Topaz, Runway, Kling and many more, layered onto After Effects and Unreal Engine. The production rule is to use the tools for what they’re good and never generate from scratch, they say. Always augment something they had actually photographed or built. In other words, AI as a skin, not a skeleton.
“They don’t bear the wonky hallmarks of generative AI output from years past, but it’s not hard to believe they were AI-generated”, WIRED
In Season 2, the AI shot count jumped to 400 shots and the production had expanded to 30 different tools (both traditional and AI), covering image, sound and video generation, the LA Times reported. The key technical leap, detailed in a VP-Land breakdown of the production, was style transfer: training the system on the show's actual photographic look and applying that aesthetic over AI-generated content, so the join disappears in the final cut.
“It’s not a comparison of what would “Moses” have cost otherwise. It’s a comparison of “Moses” would have never been made otherwise, and that’s the way you have to think about it”, Jon Erwin, series creator and co-showrunner to LA Times, when asked about using AI to replace background extras in crowd scenes.
DREAMS OF VIOLETS — THE FULLY GENERATED
Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute film about the January 2026 massacre of Iranian civilians by Iranian regime forces. It costed $2,000 and was done by a single filmmaker working nights while holding down a day job, during 3 months. It will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
The film was directed and produced by Ash and Pooya Koosha, Iranian brothers who left their country in 2009 and are now in exile. The idea was born from the urgency to tell this specific story. In this case, the use of AI had nothing to do with budget, it was a geo-political reality. To make it, every image and person in the film were fully AI-generated (using Nanobanana, Kling AI, Claude and Gemini) built from journalistic reports, photographs and eyewitness accounts of the massacre.
"The AI pipeline made it possible to do what would otherwise have been impossible: to create a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross", Ash Koosha, director, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The director also argues that this new filmmaking pipeline will create new roles. In an interview with MS Now, he points to generational shifts in filmmaking as precedent: when Lord of the Rings pioneered the digital intermediate process in the early 2000s, converting film negatives into fully digital workflows, the traditional film splicer became the DIT. Roles change. Evolve. Are even invented. New technology does that. For Koosha, this moment is no different, and AI will ultimately find its way to be meaningful for people, both in terms of the stories it allows to tell and the new jobs it will generate.
"[The movie] is a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not simply as tools of innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling", Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca co-founder.
Dreams of Violets is not the only fully AI-generated feature to arrive this season. Hell Grind, a 95-minute action-fantasy made by director Aitore Zholdaskali and a team of 15 on Higgsfield's platform, screened during Cannes in May, as a side event, at a cost of under $500,000. But Dreams of Violets is the first to be accepted into a major festival's official selection.
SO, WHAT IS AN AI FILM?
Three productions. One with a $70M budget and a Hollywood director. One inside a full-scale TV production at Amazon. One made by a single filmmaker in exile, with $2,000 and a story that couldn't be told any other way. The word "AI film" is being used to describe all three.
Three films. Three approaches. Three mindsets and reasons to reach for the same tool.
What they show is that the wall between a story and its audience is getting lower. It won't disappear. But it's getting lower. And it's not just AI: YouTubers are self-distributing features into cinema theatres without a single gatekeeper. The industry is changing from multiple directions at once.
The debate about whether to use AI at all feels beside the point. CGI faced (and faces) the same resistance. So did digital cameras. The industry absorbed all of them.
"AI, CGI, practical. They are tools. Use them if you like them(...). Use everything you can to make the movie better. Don't listen to people. Do what is in your head... and read books", Lloyd Kaufman, director of The Toxic Avenger (1982), Sitges Film Festival 2025
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