Would you pay to watch an AI film?

No. If people didn't care enough about it to actually make it, I don't care enough to see it.

AI cannot generate the performances to make me care about the characters. AI cannot conceive of the rhythm and flow of an action scene which is limited by natural actions and training (eg. Keanu Reeves in John Wick, or the choreography of a proper no sfx fight scene).

Any AI slop I've seen recently, you could pick a still frame and it might look like the real thing, but in motion it is so unnatural and distracting. Characters don't make eye contact with each other. The cadence of their speech is off. Their movements don't fit what they're saying or are wildly exaggerated.

It can go get f*cked as far as I'm concerned.

Technically, I don't think we're far off from AI being able to make full length films.

Morally, I'm not a fan. Any generative AI capable of doing this has been trained on stolen copyrighted material so anything produced by it is copyright theft. It's one thing for someone who was never going to pay for a cinema ticket to torrent a copy of a movie, it's quite another for someone to try and profit from stolen material.

It really is the modern version of the lads that used to sell DVDs/video tapes of movies recorded on camcorders. I'm expecting some massive class action suits against the AI companies tbh.

It's true that AI will be able to put absolutely anything on the screen, but that doesn't mean the films will be worth watching.

There's a reason 'Jaws' is still so watchable, no matter how many times you've seen it, how dated it is or how unconvincing the roboshark is. It is a well told story. Good writing, good acting. A slow build, where we are given time to get to know the characters so the peril feels real and the payoff is meaningful.

Think about why 'Jurassic Park' is so rewatchable, and the more recent additions to the franchise are so forgettable. The first film is a well told story, the newer ones are spectacle. More dinosaurs, more teeth, more chases - so why aren't they more exciting? 'The Lord of the Rings' films were magical. 'The Hobbit' films were barely watchable. Again - MORE spectacle, MORE swooping camerawork, more of everything except storytelling.

I think the thing is that AI doesn't have a subconscious. The tiny imperceptible gestures that actors aren't aware they're making and we're not aware we're seeing, that's where a performance comes alive. Or the subtle signifiers in set design that tell us more about the characters than pages of dialogue, even though we might not fully appreciate how it's happening. All the things that push a director or an actor to ask for more takes of a scene, trying to capture something they can't put their finger on.

Imagine if somebody pitched '2001 A Space Odyssey' or 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' now. There's no need to hold back, you can have anything you can imagine on the screen, why waste time building characters and allowing tension to slowly take a grip on the audience? Imagine the flashbangy mess of mindblowing setpieces we'd be subjected to.

I think there are going to be lots of stupid groundbreaking AI films to come, and I think the really great, very mainstream, blockbuster films of the past will have their moment again. 'Die Hard', 'Terminator 2' and 'The Untouchables' will seem like the Sistine Chapel in comparison to the dreck that will flood streaming services. I would love to be able to see all these in the cinema again and I hope the AI-ridden films of the near future make cinematic re-releases more common.

The best film I've seen in a long time was 'The Holdovers.' In a million years, AI couldn't have made something like that.

Were the copyright holders paid for the materials use in training the AI? No. Therefore it's copyright theft IMO.

We'll have to wait for the inevitable class actions to see which of our opinions are correct on this but with the right judge (or more likely, in the right jurisdiction - the USA is probably a lost cause) I can see many AI companies being bankrupted by this.