Ninth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Cinema and artificial intelligence have shared a bond for over a century. This presentation explores recent representations and employment of AI in film contextualized by a history dating back to the 1920s, long before such technologies were developed. Cinema has long conceived of itself as a creative machine that relies on a combination of human ingenuity and technological tools. It is thus not surprising that it is constantly drawn to depict this relationship on screen while it employs new creative technologies in practice. Metropolis (1927) and other 1920s films expressed unease around creating artificial life, while Dziga Vertov explored algorithmic editing techniques that presaged the rise of AI-driven filmmaking decades later. The 1960s refined these ideas, with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) posing the risks of autonomous AIs overcoming constraints, as computer-generated animation experiments explored and developed those very technologies to make films. Recent films like After Yang (2022) and The Artifice Girl (2023) examine existential ideas around consciousness, intelligence, and emotional bonds with artificial beings. As these films speculate on the near future, concurrent experiments with generative cinema, from Lev Manovich’s “database cinema” to entirely AI-driven shorts, are rapidly working toward developing the future of human-AI creative collaborations. Current anxieties over generative filmmaking are thus not new. Nor is cinema’s desire to push the boundaries of creative technologies. By analyzing AI’s representation and use at three crucial stages, this paper demonstrates how past depictions and experiments inform speculative AI-driven futures being discussed and explored today.