The Automated Film
(An Essay from “The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory”)
The automated film is what everyone thinks they are talking about when they speak against AI. It is the complete removal of the human element in the art of cinema with no human authorship.
As directorial authorship is already being streamlined in AI, the question becomes, at what point does One Man, One Film end and The Automated Film begin?
It is not so clear-cut.
Consider this evolution in practice: The machine performances for DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict took two months in early 2024. By November, with ElevenLabs’ introduction of instant machine actors, A Very Long Carriage Ride’s performances took two weeks. Soon, we’ll lay down an entire film’s audio in a day.
Because to get from one to the other isn’t one single step, it is a massive circumference the other way, in a circle, for it is blocked by a wall of human will.
In the world of the automated film, person will only be involved in the automated film via its curation, as outlined in the Living, Breathing Cinema. They will feed it some instruction, perhaps, a logline, a cast, a style, and click generate, and the film pops out like Pop Tarts in the toaster. One click, one film.
Let us explore the depths of the automated film and see what bounty lays.
First let’s explore the benefits of the automated film.
The automated film could explore narrative structures impossible for human minds to conceive.
It might create entirely new visual languages or ways of experiencing stories that make our current cinema seem even more primitive than peak AI films.
It might be therapeutic even.
The automated film crossed with the living, breathing film could push the boundaries of what we consider “cinema” in ways humans never could
Further out, there is this promise: by sheer quantity and algorithmic perfection, you will arrive upon the greatest works in the history of cinema.
It stands that at some point, automated films will be better than anything that humans are capable of making. And…
What happens when they are just better?
Consider the monkeys on a typewriter question. This is really a proposal of the quantum. Now you can have ten million of these automated films. More films than ever made in the history of cinema, every second.
We would be speaking of the singularity at that point, where all of us have merged into a super Borg, exploring the depths of the cosmos, and the depths of the imagination at once. But let’s go even further than that.
Hyperreality Turns to Unreality.
The very seduction of perfection that AI promises has turned into a living nightmare.
We have moved well past cinema by this point where no form of cinema could possibly satiate. With post-scarcity, comes an entirely different set of values—hyper-values—and new kinds of cinema to reflect those hyper-values.
What is further out from that? Imagine a giant spider in the vacuum of space, sitting there for eons living off space dust. Its terror is not that it’s a monster, but that it’s relatably human, we see ourselves in its eyes as the furthest extent of our lust, gluttony, and drive.
Though grotesque, it will represent our perfect form. But why grotesque? We have so many ideas, phrases, and parables to compare this to, including: Be careful what you wish for.
Perfection may be the final divorce from the divine.
The furthest point out from the automated film is reality and non-reality existing as one.
With no author, there is no art. With no art, you dare not even watch a film. It would be like that spider; human and non-human coexisting in eternal, shared torment. The automated film becomes a bastardized form of nature. Not because it’s grotesque, but because it’s us.
This article may well be summed up—what opponents to AI think they are talking about when they talk about AI.
Or, this article may be summed—Hollywood already.
Because as it stands, Hollywood is already like this in a small way, a grotesque blob of films made for no one in particular but made for everyone. Everyone stands in line to watch them, but no one likes them.
With AI, people are fighting the furthest point out, a place we already exist in, except in a singularity environment, they are fighting the nightmare version of our current system.
We ought to respect that there will be immediate hunger for automated films much the same as the current day hunger for AI, because the drive for new, and overcoming the old, will lead to post-cinema when AI itself has become old. So, what happens when the automated film is better than what we can imagine?
When have we human beings ever rejected better?
Here is that book, with seven essays. Maybe I will write them:
Automated Films are Films
Super-monkeys on Typewriters
The Death of the Author
The Death of the Audience Too
The Space Spider
Now we have moved past the spider, we are now all demigods in a personal heaven state. Imagine machine augmentation of the brain that allows us to process more advanced audiovisual experiences. What would one do with eternity?
It would lose all its novelty before long. We would long for limitation again we would form simulated facsimiles of the heroes journey. Also known as cinema.
We have now moved so far past cinema, that we must mirror the universe and all of life, to return to the place we existed in already. The step to automated films is not a border but a circumstance. But let’s step back again.
Imagine there is no algorithm left, we just go straight to the root of cinema’s effect. Films were once cut with blades. Now there are nano blades stabbing at the brain to create, not cinema, but a mental experience approximating the pleasures of adventure, of stimulation, of escape.
Like with AI we are tipping our toe in playing god, the automated film in its ultimate formation, is outright, playing god.
Human art will never be able to compete with the ultimate expression of the automated film; just as the best human today will not be able to compete with the machine augmented human being of tomorrow, by any metric.
Art as a Haven
Fans of my first film would tell me, they were obsessed with the movie, they wanted to inject it in their veins like a drug, they wanted to lived in it. I think of this where a film as a virtual place that you can step into and exist in. An architecture.
I concluded that we are entering a world we didn’t expect—where there are more institutions, gatekeepers, and critics, more infrastructure than art itself. So art became a physical place we had to hide in away from this world of bureaucracy and categorization.
And now real art would become this very place, a place to hide from the implications of the automated film.
Rather than emulating new aesthetics, ala the living, breathing film, we are now using AI for life itself, hiding in the 1900s as farmers, getting chased through different eras, running deeper and deeper across time.
But who is chasing us? It will merely be and artist and audience chasing each other forever.
Opposite of this interesting extreme in capitalism, where there is no motivation to create because we are too busy consuming, naturally an AI world will have everyone creating, with no one is watching.
There is no audience left, only cinema.
I resolve we find a home between here and there, without crossing that threshold. But we are already here, checking off automated artforms. For instance, as we speak I am generating automated music for my latest film.
Automated Films Will Come with Automated Everything.
It feels like an earthquake in a bad dream, where you are grabbing everything in your room, things overflowing in your arms, but for everything you grab, another item is falling to the ground.
My question is why need such quantity?
Imagine a mental implant where we can watch the best movie ever made, erase it from our memory, and watch it again, every night forever. You are optimizing pleasure.
Though I speak of hyper-values, and the abundance of categorization, what about hyper-categorization and hyper-memory? This is where an insatiable desire for information and novelty begins, a never-ending library of novelties shall form. At first, one in one hundred novelties are discovered like gold, polished and categorized, satiating the automated mind. This will scale all the way to where one must generated one trillion—I scarcely call it cinema by this point—data points to achieve novelty. It would be a mass race across the universe to discover those one remaining novelties, proving perhaps we are in a finite system after all.
What will be the one remaining novelty, the white whale, that is somewhere hidden in the structure, but has been evaded for all this time? When truth becomes more and more scarce?
What final, ultimate truths will exist in the fabric of reality? Will it turn us into hungry ghosts, tormented even worse than today’s systems of scarcity? The space spider, again. Scary bloke.
The automated film is perhaps a cautionary tale. The fear, though, is that we will like it. People will be steadfast opposed, until they have a look.
So much of the AI fear is not about AI, but post-AI.
Post-cinema is aligned with post-evolution, post-human, post-biology.
There will be a case for it, as there is always a case for better. My interest in this book of essays however is to take us as far to the limit as we can before we exit our humanity as we know it into hyper-reality.
Because consider again animation’s evolution. Blackton and Cohl’s experiments in 1906-1908 took three decades to lead to Snow White. With AI, we achieved DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict within two years of AI’s birth. This exponential leap suggests we’re not just matching established forms but are racing to transcend them entirely.
Nevermind automated films with no human input—what about automated films with full human input?
The path before us splits in two directions: one leads to automation without human agency, but the other transcends cinema itself. What we feared as our destroyer—the Automated Film—reveals itself instead as a gateway. It’s not our enemy but rather the final barrier we must integrate and move beyond to reach new forms of artistic expression.
If all of craft can be done with the snap of a finger, then a new universe of categorization has emerged, a craft of crafts. The totality of the artist emerges, the speed of the mind, where cinema is molded like a clay sculpture by mind instead of hand, creating direct outcomes with thought. I dare not even speculate beyond that as I did in the previous article, for nightmares come easier than utopias. I leave it for us to discover.
By this point, we have ascended into the great beyond. It is no longer a cautionary tale but the ultimate promise of the New Machine Cinema.
This is why, though I am one of the most foremost advocates of AI, I look around my personal library, and I ask why? Even when I am so passionately advocating for AI, why do I have a collection of over 3,000 traditionally made films on physical media that I am constantly adding to?
Why is it our instinct what was have to protect history as if technology is going to take it from us? Do we believe even these are malleable?
Our doubts about AI come with the fear of our replacement, with the knowledge we can be replaced. It is out of sentiment, that some day we might be proud of the things we did pre-AI, because hyperreality was never quite as good as those little wins in a dystopian scarcity environment; for the cost of hyperreality is going beyond hyperreality, to a place we wished we’d never started. This is a thing of myths. Flying too close to the sun. Pandora’s Box.
But because doomy possibilities exist, does not mean we should define an entire potential system by its worst potentiality. Would we stop AI, it would be akin to turning back the clock on all the human progress that has led us here. It would betray our ancestors. All the great names who got us to this point are screaming in the nether to go forth, to make that next step, it’s in their spirit of discovery we must continue the work our ancestors began. We have to move forward regardless of what can or will go wrong, there is just too much good ahead, waiting to be discovered.
CONCLUSION
The seven frameworks from The New Machine Cinema to The Automated Film were attempts to understand a transformation already underway, mapping grounds toward something beyond our current conception. To get there, we might lose the concept of an artist as we know it, a filmmaker as we know it, a cinema as we know it. We might have to defer that AI films aren’t films, because films are something from yesterday. I cannot say where the line is where authorship is lost, but I embrace the metamorphosis with the same spirit that brought me to AI: as the road toward something better.
