Students in the Directed Research Group, Generative Cinematography: Critical and Creative Reckonings with AI Filmmaking, have been exploring creative potentials and perils of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for independent/amateur filmmaking.

Amid recent advances in large language models such as DALL-E, GPT, Runway AI, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, AI is increasingly generating moving pictures, screenplays, and sounds, as well as supporting post-production. On one hand, AI is threatening to undermine artists and the humanistic craft of filmmaking. From a labor standpoint, Hollywood film workers have striked against exploitative uses of automation. What is more, AI is raising critical concerns around training data ethics, as well as the generation of algorithmically-biased representations, narratives, and sounds. On the other hand, AI might present potential to lower barriers for low-resourced independent/amateur filmmakers. For filmmakers with social-justice oriented agendas, reappropriating AI might offer a way to expose its harms and possibly even generate otherworldly possibilities. As this tension seems to reanimate how the invention of the camera threatened painting, students have been working through and against how AI troubles filmmaking, examining who and what gets lost. 

Throughout winter quarter, students have worked as individuals or in groups to produce a short film approximately 2-10 mins long. Join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering for a film screening to view the results of this work.

Questions? Contact Brett Halperin, HCDE PhD student, at bhalp@uw.edu.