Artificial Intelligence: AI and our history with disruptive technology as it relates to storytelling and filmmaking

Artificial Intelligence: AI and our history with disruptive technology

Important caveat to begin: This is not an advocation for AI in any way. It is an objective look at the realities we’re facing in the entertainment industry and the world.

PART I: DISRUPTION

The fear is that AI is and/or will be “taking jobs away from humans” and that is true. That process has already begun.

What’s important to recognize is that since the invention of the wheel, humans have been inventing machines that remove humans from labor. Consider how one wheel attached to a “bucket” (a wheelbarrow) allows one human to do the labor of several. Attach 18 wheels to an engine/trailer and one human can move hundreds of thousands of pounds, thousands of miles, instead of hiring thousands of humans to complete that task by hand.

The earliest discovered physical wheel is the Ljubljana Marshes Wheel, a wooden disc unearthed in 2002 in the Ljubljana Marshes of Slovenia. Radiocarbon dating places it between 3,100 and 3,350 BCE.

Disruptive technology has been with humanity and the film industry for a long time. Consider the matte painting. One person with a brush is literally putting scores of construction workers out of jobs by painting, say, a building or spaceship instead of that structure being actually constructed in the real world.

One of dozens of matte paintings created for Star Wars.

George Lucas’s Young Indiana Jones series began the process of “tiling,” filming a small group of background extras then reproducing them in post to create large crowds, instead of hiring hundreds or thousands of human extras.

http://www.theraider.net/films/young_indy/making_4_specialeffects.php

CGI is used to put costumes on superheroes and props in their hands which takes away jobs/man-hours from human costumers and prop makers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-evolution-of-how-marvel-animated-iron-mans-suit-2020-7

You get the idea. AI is just the latest machine invented by humans, that wasn’t ostensibly invented with the express purpose of taking jobs, but like the wheel, replacing jobs is one of the side-effects. The difference here is that AI has the ability to impact nearly every job on and off a typical movie set. The “thinking” jobs, like screenwriting, logistics, and budgeting are now under threat as well as physical production elements like camera, costumes, sets, makeup, and the soundtrack.

And despite the attempts to insult and shame it out of existence with terms like “slop,” the technology is now very good. If it wasn’t, the fear wouldn’t be as prevalent. We’re no longer shrugging off images of Will Smith eating spaghetti like a wiggly 1940s cartoon character. What we’re looking at now in 2026 is becoming indiscernible from what can be captured in reality with real humans on both sides of a camera. AI is anything but “slop” these days.

So this issue of machines threatening livelihoods isn’t a new problem in any way. Humans excel at harming themselves. There are talks about regulating the use of AI, but similar arguments were leveled against CGI when it was becoming prevalent and now it is ubiquitous and accepted without question.

The original ‘Tron’ was disqualified from the visual-effects category in the 1982 Academy Awards because they considered using a computer ‘cheating’. https://www.slashfilm.com/1177735/why-tron-was-disqualified-from-being-a-visual-effects-oscar-nominee/

And with this so-called “business friendly” government, we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for Big Government to swoop in to save the day with regulations and worker protections.

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool) https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

The reality is likely a bit less bleak than most people want to paint it. Sure, it will be possible to make an entire movie with AI, but those on-screen characters won’t be able to walk red carpets, give real interviews, have real scandals…all the things that audiences and fans love to see. And most storytellers want to use real actors and cameras and places to make their movies. So, AI will most likely just become woven into those processes, for instance enabling a small budget project to now have “big shots” they otherwise can’t afford to go shoot with a camera the way CGI is used now. AI can be used to create sets and costumes and thousands of background extras, the way CGI is now used today without question. AI will be used to help schedule and budget projects, create proposals, and read/evaluate more screenplays more quickly than humans are capable of doing.

Yes, humans ostensibly should be hired to do all of those jobs because more employment means more humans have more income that they can use to buy things. And buying more things increases demand for products/services which spurs more hiring which creates more employed humans who buy more things thus creating more demand….and so on. Economies work from the bottom up, not because of “trickle down.” People with money buy things. People without money don’t buy things.

But, as shown above, humans excel at harming themselves by inventing “labor saving devices” that reduce employment, putting humans out of work, which decreases demand for products/services, which increases unemployment, which ultimately harms the economy and that trickles into other problems, like increased crime, domestic violence, homelessness, hunger, etc. We’re our worst enemy.

Investors will always look to cut manufacturing costs (while increasing prices), so studios/producers will happily accept and even mandate the use of these tools just as they’ve used matte paintings, CGI, digital editing, digital cameras, and anything else that “improves productivity.” One way to stop that is for the humans who would use those tools to say “No, I won’t!” and stop. But it isn’t likely.

AI has a lot of societal, political, and environmental problems that we absolutely do need to address, but short of a permanent power outage or a Butlerian Jihad where we incinerate all the data centers, AI isn’t going away any time soon.

PART II: LAZY

And despite the rhetoric, AI isn’t as easy as one lazy person just pushing a button with a movie popping out the other end. That’s not the way AI works at all.

A compelling story still has to be written. The human still has to envision what those shots need to look like. The characters need to be embodied and described to be realistic and compelling. The kid at a keyboard still has to direct the same way a director on a real set has to issue instructions and answer questions. Those shots still need to be edited, a soundtrack has to be imagined and created, distribution work has to be done.

Anyone who has used generative AI knows that it hardly ever kicks back the exact images the user prompts. And real-life filmmaking works the same way. The exact image or performance the writer, then the director, envisions is rarely the exact image or performance that is committed to film or 1s and 0s. There are always compromises on real life sets. A project may lose a location it wants and have to settle for something else. The animatronic shark may break down constantly. The actor may be sick that day and a big fight scene turns into him just shooting the bad guy once. The beautiful sunrise shot is ruined by clouds or rain.

Real filmmaking is almost nothing BUT compromise away from the original intention and vision, sometimes which benefits the project if lucky. And the same occurs with AI, which is remarkably UN-directable at this point (which Ben Affleck’s AI company is working to solve). https://deadline.com/2026/04/netflix-ben-affleck-ai-firm-interpositive-film-production-savings-1236770381/

Point is, there’s still a lot of real work that has to be done to “make a movie in AI” and it can be as unpredictable as real filmmaking is.

PART III: THEFT vs INSPIRATION

As to to the “AI is theft!” argument. Something I read a while back suggested that “this” generation of filmmakers primarily base their story ideas on the MOVIES they had seen (Star Wars, Indy, Ghostbusters, etc) and don’t have many actual new ideas based on their own experiences. The idea was that previous generations of filmmakers had lived life “out there” then made stories about those experiences. Something like American Graffiti would qualify. Scorcese’s “fabric of NYC” maybe.

But then again, even those guys (primarily men) either built their movies from other movies or at least inserted homages to previous movies they had seen. Star Wars is exhibit one in that category.

The Real History That Inspired ‘Star Wars’

Historical figures and events informed George Lucas as he created his sci-fi saga in a galaxy far, far away.

When George Lucas developed the storyline for Star Wars and crafted his heroes and villains, he tapped into elements of theology, mysticism and mythology as well as his knowledge of classic films. And befitting a story set a “long time ago,” real-life history also played a central role in shaping the filmmaker’s space opera.

“I love history, so while the psychological basis of ‘Star Wars’ is mythological, the political and social bases are historical,” Lucas told the Boston Globe in a 2005 interview. In fact, the filmmaker is such a history buff that he collaborated in the publication of the 2013 book Star Wars and History, which was edited by history professors Nancy R. Reagin and Janice Liedl.

Written by a dozen leading historians and reviewed and confirmed by Lucas, Star Wars and History identifies the numerous real-life figures and events that inspired the science-fiction franchise, including the following: Read the entire article at https://www.history.com/articles/the-real-history-that-inspired-star-wars

Spielberg gets attaboys for his one-ers, but that style, he admits, was inspired by Vincente Minnelli, John Ford, Hitchcock, and William Wyler & Lewis Milestone. Sam Raimi’s zoom/dolly is pulled right from Vertigo.

The point is, all the signature styles that audiences credit modern directors with, tend to be derivative too.

But even if we concede that Spielberg and Raimi stole from Hitchcock, even Hitchcock was inspired by F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and D.W. Griffith before him. And Griffith’s innovative cross cutting style was inspired by Charles Dickens. And Dickens’ style was influenced by Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe. You could do this all day.

So if a new director, or AI, “steals” a style from anyone, they’re just in a long line of directors who did the same thing. And if AI does it, it’s only because they’re building it to behave like humans. Mission accomplished!

We’re all constantly being “inspired” by art and history and information that came before us, scraping our memories of art we saw before to find a way to integrate that “style” into what we want to create today. We refer to humans doing it as “inspiration” but AI doing it is “theft,” but there is literally no difference except that AI ostensibly can see and remember the entirety of human art while any one human has a much more limited scope of experience and memory. So the kid at a keyboard telling the AI to “make an evil looking helmet that has elements from the Japanese and German military” is quite literally the same thing George Lucas asked of his Star Wars artists who went on to create the iconic Darth Vader visage.

PART IV: “BUT A HUMAN DID IT!”

The primary argument against AI in the zeitgeist right now is that the difference between “inspiration” by humans and “theft” by AI is that “a human did it, not a machine!”

Let’s review that truck driver at the beginning of our story above. Yes, a human is still driving the truck, but just one human doing the work that would require hundreds or thousands. And with AI, there is one human still involved doing the work that would otherwise require hundreds or thousands. We accept the truck driver, we reject the AI director, but they’re doing the same thing, operating the same way, doing the work of many.

Which takes us back to humanity’s unrelenting desire to harm ourselves.

There’s a concept called “The Moloch Barrier.” The following is a passage from an article by Daniel Miessler which explains this concept:

Moloch: The Most Dangerous Idea

Why we chase things we know will hurt us if we get them

It’s pronounced MOL-uck.

What is it? Practically speaking, it’s something like an accelerating race towards a goal that has both a tremendous payoff and that guarantees our destruction. It’s a race to the bottom, where the bottom is the destruction of our species.

Moloch is a race that’ll probably kill us, but that we can’t help but run.

Everyone is sprinting towards AGI at top speed not only because they want the benefits — which they do — but also because they know everyone else is sprinting. So that’s the FOMO aspect.

The worst part is that everyone knows they should stop running, but they can’t.

But we also know it’ll give us tremendous economic and military advantages. So the greed kicks in and makes us run even faster.

And finally we have good ol’ self-preservation. Living under a super-intelligence-powered China would not be fun for anyone. And that’s assuming China could control it.

So even if the West was able to control its greed, and wanted to stop, we know China and Russia won’t. So we won’t either.

Individuals can’t stop the race because you need everyone to stop at the same time.

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/moloch-the-most-dangerous-idea

This imagery of MOLOCH appears in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis, which explores the deep exploitation of an oppressed working class to sustain a luxurious utopia for the wealthy elite.

PART V: THE SOLUTION

Well, this is a bigger question that gets into politics, the economy, and ideology. An argument can be made that disruptive technology doesn’t kill jobs, but it just shifts them to other sectors.

Take the blacksmiths who shoed horses for a living as they watched the new-fangled “horseless carriages” putter past their shops. The automobile all but ruined the industries that revolved around widespread use of horses for transportation. People who made horseshoes, saddles, wagons, provided horse feed, poop scoopers…all those people lost their jobs. But, automobile manufacturing has employed millions of other people for decades across a wide spectrum of specialties.

In 1900, DC Horse Dealers Said the Automobile Was a Fad https://ghostsofdc.org/2018/07/16/horse-dealers-claim-automobiles-a-fad/

But that job creation isn’t always a guarantee. Inventions like the wheel and AI still require at least one human, but do remove hundreds or thousands from the workforce. So what to do about it?

As stated, unless we have a Dune-inspired Butlerian Jihad and incinerate all the machines that steal jobs from humans, we will have to adjust our economic system to accommodate all those out-of-work humans… or let them all suffer and die.

Adjust to what? One possibility is to adjust our system away from the “Survival of the Fittest” model which unregulated Capitalism rests on and toward an empathetic model which does not require a human to pay for the basic elements of survival, namely shelter, healthy nutrition, and healthcare. If we made (at least) those elements cost-less to individuals, then the very real threat of AI or any other machine taking their jobs is greatly diminished. If a machine takes YOUR job but you still have a home, clothing, food, and healthcare, you won’t wind up on living in a box under a freeway overpass wondering how you’ll eat today.

“But that’s socialism!!!” No, it’s called Democratic-Socialism (not the same thing a socialism despite the name) which is a widely used system worldwide where wise governments ensure that their populations do not needless suffer for any reason.

The gist is that you’d still have a roof over your head, food to eat, and healthcare even if you had no income. You won’t be punished with homelessness, hunger, or preventable disease if you lose your job for any reason, like AI or globalization.

And this is where ideology comes into the discussion. Conservatives, by and large, have been trained to demonize anything that resembles “government helping the citizens.” They want everyone to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” or just die.

Ron Paul’s Conservative audience shouts out an enthusiastic “Let him die!” https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2011/09/13/sot-ron-paul-health-insurance.cnn

That’s the lack of empathy…ostensibly, sociopathy, a mental illness… being codified into secular law. Basically, unfettered Capitalism is instructing humans to believe in the selfish adage, “I got mine, you get yours, and if you can’t get enough, they F you!” as a virtue. They view success as a blessing that someone deserves proving that they worked harder than everyone else while failure is a sign that an individual just isn’t good enough or worthy enough to enjoy any modicum of quality of life.

The question for the Conservative-minded out there is, when AI “takes your job” and you find yourself struggling to pay for those basic essentials, will you judge yourself as being the cause of your own failure or will you acknowledge that circumstances out of your control have contributed to your downfall? It’s a reality for many people, since Globalization began to erode the Middle Class as manufacturing was offshored for cheaper unregulated labor, decimating small towns across the USA.

In terms of the film industry, how many jobs have US workers lost as the tax incentive programs across the globe have allowed Los Angeles-based studios/producers to scour the world for the “best deals” along with cheaper unregulated labor? It’s the same thing that other industries have suffered with since NAFTA began this process decades ago.

(Important caveat here: This is NOT referring to film production that goes on location to shoot a real location because the story is set in that location. Movie production SHOULD do that when possible for authenticity, etc. This is referring to productions that seek out cities to shoot in ONLY because the tax incentive deal or cheaper labor allows them to save money on production, even when that location is not appropriate or ideal for the story that is being told.)

The point here is that there are various ways that humans can be eliminated from their jobs with technology and economic tools, but we have tools, like Democratic-Socialism, which can provide a safety net to protect those whose livelihoods are threatened by those who seek to remove all of us to replace us with fewer or zero humans at all (as robotics merges with AI).

The arguments against AI have thus far mostly been fairly superficial and largely non-starters, from baseless insults (“AI slop”) to hypocritical accusations (“AI is theft!”) and redundant economic arguments (“AI is taking our jobs!”). If we wish to find solutions to the valid question of how humans can remain integral to storytelling, in all its forms, the discussions need to rise above these bumper sticker slogans and become more nuanced and serious in terms of our entire economic system and ideology as our species and civilization moves forward into this century. This is not a simple problem and will not have a simple solution. It’s time we grow up and take a serious look at what our purpose here on Earth is and what it should be so we can at least try to shape a better future for our kids and everyone else who will have to live through whatever the world is that we leave for them.