The Future Audience Will Be Machines
(From Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays in AI Film Theory, Volume 2 of The New Machine Cinema)
Exploring a post-audience future of cinema.
In the future, everyone will be a filmmaker, no one will be an audience.
When AI replaces everything in the filmmaking pipeline, with only a single author sculpting the film, the question becomes, what happens to the audience?
The answer: AI will not only replace the production, it will replace the audience too.
Because no artist will be a better artist than the machines, no audience will be a better audience either.
My vision for the future of cinema has more in common with sports, the one hundred meter dash or four minute mile. A film’s worth is no longer dictated on whether a common person can watch it and say, that was good, or the establishment clergy who watch it and rubber stamp where it suits the tenets of the orthodoxy. Today, both instances of input and output have little to do with the film itself.
AI was created as a response to the institutions, gatekeepers, mass audiences, the critical establishment, the finance, each layer operating as a filter—after filter after filter destroying the artistic output, we have the last remaining sterile film representing the zeitgeist purely—its politics, its nihilism, its cynicism.
As is, the end result consists of diluted films only, output preceding input, representing the lowest common denominator of either mass audience, or establishment. Visualize that you must pick any random person off the street, no matter who they are, and they must accept the film, else it fails. On the other end, a critic not writing a review for the reader, but for his friends within the institution, to nod along and sneer.
Remove this cast around how films are judged, amplified, and filtered, and the only thing that will remain is the artistic. But what can possibly pry open such casting?
Enter AI.
A more perfect machine augmented reality will require a more perfect machine augmented cinema to speak to it.
We would get a pressure cooker, an arms race in the arts. The standards will be so impossibly high that the culture will enter into a golden age. And it won’t be unforeseeable, if one commits themselves, they will be able to contribute to this architecture.
Cinema will be free to have movements and sub-movements, algorithmic measures will trounce all human measures. It will be a noble pursuit, not a financial one, akin to sculptors and painters of yore. And the algorithm will connect us to our audience.
We can now explore a body of work to the full conclusion.
Humans will no longer decide things because our brains will be too weak to interface with the complexity the future requires, while simultaneously, the machine will require every one of our contributions.
Two options.
Route number two, the old way. Excellence is decided by a small group of people determining merit based on 1. Surface level aesthetics. 2. Politics. 3. “I was entertained.” 4. “The star power will further our institution.”
Option two. The machine future, champions nothing but excellence.
Pushback: “The idea that algorithmic measures will create purely merit-based evaluation ignores how algorithms themselves embody values, preferences, and biases.”
My rebuttal: I have said it from the start, AI only needs to be one percent better to justify its entire existence, further the overhaul of an entire system. But this is not one percent better, it is a total overhaul of the old boy’s club. Remember, the old way led us to this point.
Now, from the spectrum of now to the machine audience, we can explore the incremental steps.
Pushback. “New forms of gatekeeping may emerge, just with different machine gatekeepers.”
My response: Perhaps, but AI systems will decentralize those systems as well. Novelty will be required almost as a matter of course. It is sort of how professional athletes are constantly replaced once they pass their prime. The system will now require new blood, instead of awaiting the 47th Ridley Scott sequel.
Pushback: “Why would any system volunteer its power to machine curation?”
My response: This is not so black and white. The concessions may come gradually as a matter of manpower more than anything. As well, a system that is purely quantified, merit based and mechanic, will outcompete any system operating under older models.
Pushback: “This will come with its own sorts of biases, it will have its own favorites, and we will end up exactly where we started; a new old boy’s club.”
My response: This is a challenge in machine curation, is how it will be able to navigate the new. For arguments sake, perhaps it will outsource to a talented subset of the fringe to curate a machine fringe. It is also important to distinguish universal quality from quality subsets. The best movie about, say, the gay experience will also exist alongside the general experience within different categories. Much as how the festivals ask for what race you are to offer a specific consideration for unrepresented groups—which will be seen as a primitive form of how machines make such calculations.
You see this is the thing about our institutions, they were always sort of in the ballpark, but too simple to circumvent with power. In AI, the algorithm gives everything exactly what is needed to which pipeline. As it is, quality doesn’t exactly scale in this way. It is the same four or five, or twenty five names every year determined in such a crass way—the phone call, the friend of a friend, the connection.
Quality, much as any individual believes, requires a mix of the subjective and the objective. It is very common for a great indie film to emerge in microbudget, and the ones around that filmmaker are simply unable to recognize this. If, suddenly, press rolls in, the same ones will now see the very same filmmaker as a beacon of quality cinema. Machine curation of the arts will recognize such individuals at the very outset, something society is simply unable to do due to its complete reliance on money, fame, and power as a driving force of interest. In post-scarcity, where money, fame, and power are no longer weighing into merit, the art can finally emerge.
PRECEDENTS
It has been said from the start at the very beginning of the digital cinema revolution that now, anyone can make a film. There will be a flood of them. No one can keep track. This revolution did not play out, with the rise of the modern audience especially their bite.
So what happened? Where was the independent filmmaking revolution?
The answer. The revolution did happen. The films were made. But the notion of audience itself has morphed into a ghost of what will soon actualize.
The revolution was happening in the cameras.
That they’re not being platformed is an inverse of the thesis of this article. You see our timelines are generally too small, we can only see immediately ahead of us and in front of us. But the true way about how things work sometimes operate on a timeline of decades upon decades.
It is and was happening, just on delay. It was waiting for AI.
Because the upper caste of filmmaking still need to take care of their own, to justify the institution. Therefore, the institution came first, before there was a means to process the independent revolution. Now the scaffolds are in place, as well, the bandwidth, the machine will growl with hunger.
In the machine cinema sport, there will be hundreds of talents on the level of a Spielberg.
We see this with the balkanization of streaming companies and studios. This I wager will further accelerate until everyones cinema is akin to a local theater troupe, but because it’s dispersed by machines, achieving perfection in the way of great musicians who only have to pick up a violin or sit at a piano.
And the cinema of the institution—what is today—stands in front the revolution. We can see it, vaguely behind them, happening.
As these films are being platformed by an increasingly smaller group of gatekeepers more out-of-touch with audiences than ever, in fact, who have an active contempt for audiences, have led to a certain defiance on both ends.
If gatekeepers hold the non-precious as precious. If audiences do not hold anything as precious at all. Then it will be the machines uncovering the precious like gems in a mine.
I fashion that the future audience will be machines.
The technical foundations for AI audience analysis are already emerging. We’re seeing primitive versions in recommendation algorithms and content analytics, but they lack the sophistication to truly “appreciate” art rather than just categorize it.
They are still beholden to inefficient human systems that prize non-meritocratic organization, personal connections, socioeconomic class, identity politics.
In fact it has been consistent: often, when people speak about resisting the removal of the human element, they are talking about the personal privileges they will lose when removing the corruption.
With algorithms monitoring our art, we are no longer pushing one of ten thousand films into a void in a cinema lottery.
Audiences will demand maximization that only AI could analyze via the sheer quantity of data. They will be able to actually filter the 10,000 films.
No stone would be left unturned.
It comes to this. There will be no better audience possible than AGI. The AI filmmaker will now be striving for its approval, not the critics, not the audience, not the box office. The machine opinion will be the only thing. We see this with critical aggregates, the Tomato Score. Now there will be a score from AGI. Stamped with approval by GPT or Anthropic or DeepSeek.
Film criticism would become an algorithmic process measuring thousands of technical and emotional parameters, arriving at, algorithmically, the best movie.
AI fulfills the promise of what society should have been all along. Artists will all be seen, appreciated, guided, cultivated, nourished. New needs will emerge, and the AGI would recruit us to fulfill them.
AI does not negate us, it will put us to a far more fulfilling kind of work, specifically attuned to us in a way the old system never cared to.
We enter and leave this era, even our established canon as it stands, will seem, outside the fish tank, as a distortion of a time and place. The western capitalist stardom machine, the blockbusters for instance, will seem not as relics, artifacts, or even cinema, but like cheap propaganda films, every spin no longer clouded, but loudly visible to the point of humor, or horror.
Anything capitalism on screen at all might seem egregious, even within one or two degrees. Even a trace of scarcity will be a horror, with the sheer implication, the wars, the murder, the man turned against man.
There is no timeframe for where such a revolution would take place. But the machine audience is already emerging. To rationally defend from this, one must justify the system as it stands. Would they ask, what is the point of making a film for a machine audience? I would return, what is the point of making a film to be passed through filters, shot as a film, but watched on a computer screen, shot for an audience, but the audience will be typing on their phone. The system has already distorted into a state of the irrational. We should embrace whatever insanity will restore reason.
By removing the audience and the gatekeepers at once, we haven’t lost cinema, we have freed it. We’re left with the artist.
The Automated Film
What about films made by machines, for machines?
AI audiences might develop entirely different aesthetic preferences than humans. AGI could value patterns, symmetries, or complexities invisible to human perception. This might lead to new film “genres” optimized for machine appreciation.
Films could contain embedded data or patterns that only AI can fully appreciate.
Imagine an entirely separate canon of machine favorites.
Human input would be valuable as the well-spring, but think of it only an ingredient in the machine numerical.
Of course, there will be a transition point between where human and machine audiences coexist. This might initially even be seen as a golden age. Bringing a frightening thought. Even that must accelerate, and with acceleration comes complexity, with unforeseen breaking points.
What happens when infinite content meets infinite processing capacity?
The collapse of traditional metrics like “views” or “engagement”. New metrics based on algorithmic assessment of originality or contribution to collective knowledge. The total death of the audience is no longer pretty rhetoric but actual.
Beyond this, we return to existential questions. What is the point of anything?
How soon before our entertainment is non-entertainment, incomprehensible to us without ten neurological upgrades?
Some will long for simplicity. They will enter a virtual world and live out as a single mother working in a fast food drive-through in the 1980s. They will find grit and comfort to escape algorithmic perfection in the flawed scarcity reality. It will be considered a masterpiece.
That logline, the single mother working at fast food, you can imagine already as a critically acclaimed movie from this time. It must, sort of, resemble cinema as we know it.
If there is truth for this the death of the audience doesn’t mean the death of humanity. It will not abandon us, even when it could. But between now and the farthest endpoint, the steps there will be seen as a relief. For once, the revolution will be seen.
