The Moral Argument
(An Essay from “The New Machine Cinema: Foundational Essays in AI Film Theory”)
The supposed moral crisis around AI cinema reveals itself not in reasoned debate but in visceral panic. Those who have long controlled the gates of artistic legitimacy find themselves facing an existential threat – not to art itself, but to their power to define what constitutes art. Their resistance manifests in a peculiar dance: First comes the dismissal (“AI can’t make real films”), then the moral panic (“AI steals from artists”), and finally the attempt at co-option (“Only established studios can use AI responsibly”).
What fascinates me is how this resistance mirrors deeper fault lines in our creative landscape. For generations, we’ve accepted a system where artistic legitimacy correlates almost perfectly with access to resources. We’ve normalized a world where creative visions must pass through countless filters – financiers, producers, distributors, critics – each empowered to reshape or reject based on their own interests. We’ve built elaborate justifications for why this system somehow serves art rather than simply serving power.
The machine cinema breaks this paradigm entirely, breaking not only practical barriers but philosophical ones.
Consider how we’ve fetishized the difficulty of creation – as if art’s value lies in how hard it was to make rather than in what it says to the human heart.
We’ve confused the scaffolding of artistic production with the essence of art itself.
This brings us to the heart of what I call the moral argument. To truly make a moral case against AI cinema, one would need to defend the proposition that art should remain the province of the privileged few.
They would need to argue that gatekeeping serves some higher purpose than simply maintaining existing power structures. They would need to explain why democratizing creative tools somehow damages the soul of art rather than expanding its possibilities.
They cannot make this argument because it cannot be made. Instead, they retreat to vaguer ground – speaking of “soul” and “authenticity” while carefully avoiding the question of who gets to define these terms.
They wrap economic anxieties in ethical language, hoping we won’t notice that their real concern is maintaining scarcity in an age of potential abundance.
What’s most revealing is how their arguments shift depending on who wields the technology.
When established studios use AI, it’s “innovation.” When independent creators use it, it’s “cheating.”
When wealthy productions employ digital tools, it’s “pushing boundaries.”
When outsiders do the same, it’s “grotesque and lacking soul.” These shifting standards expose the emptiness of their moral posturing.
I’ve watched microbudget masterpieces die in obscurity while mediocre films soar purely because their creators had the right friend-of-a-friend.
The old system doesn’t just create barriers, it actively works to convince creators they deserve these barriers, that their exclusion somehow serves art itself.
AI cinema represents not just technological evolution but moral imperative.
Every voice silenced by lack of resources, every vision crushed by gatekeeping, every artist told to wait their turn in a system that’s rigged and decided from your very birth, these represent moral failures of our creative ecosystem.
AI tools offer a path to correction, a way to finally separate artistic merit from access to privilege.
THE HOW NEVER MATTERED
When I had my “Aimy Micry” Graphic Novel printed, I began to push it. Institutional outset was zero across the board. Zero critics reviewed it, zero publishers considered it. Less than five people bought it in total.
The response was a typical tribal disgust response I would get used to. If he was any good, I would already know about him.
To sum up “Aimy Micry”:
No one cared that I drew every picture.
No one cared that I developed it from scratch.
No one cared the story was personal for me.
No one cared that no one cared.
I am not saying this to get pity. Drawing was something I did since I was a baby, my imagination poured onto the page every day from pen to page, very much like making AI films; and it was jarring to stop it in my mid-20s, when I was certain this would be my life’s pursuit.
Now I would like to position my debut film, “Aimy in a Cage”, adapted from the Graphic Novel and made entirely traditionally, in a similar frame. The people who watch the film:
Did not care about my financial investment in the film.
Did not care we went through hell and back building that set.
Did not care about the mechanics around the making of the film.
Did not care about the stakes involved for me, or for anyone else in the production.
Did not care ‘how’ it was made, ‘why’ it was made, or any circumstances around it.
There was one single thing they cared about: the enjoyment of the film.
There is a boundary between artist and audience that should not be crossed. We have our motives. They have theirs. In some ways, these things align.
But how strange, I have suddenly found myself in a position where, people, for the first time in history, suddenly care deeply about the how.
The truth is, they never cared. They never cared then, they don’t care now. I recognized their concerns as performative from the very beginning because I lived what they really do believe.
Let me be clear: This revolution is about finally allowing the vastness of human imaginative potential to express itself without first passing through the filters of wealth and institutional approval.
What future do we want? The real progress or the dissident treadmill, a comfortable discontent, where your dreams never happen, where you watch others achieve their deepest fantasy by arbitrary randomness.
It has no soul and it won’t be real, they say, offering a very uncomfortable question.
There was never soul. None of this was ever real.
In the old world, your future was decided at birth.
Anything that moves away from that is progress, and incremental, performative progress as compared to AI-progress is not enough.
This is not to be doomy but directly practical. If we can have better and you prevent better out of fear of the unknown then you have committed a crime against the future itself.
And if coming at AI, one better have all logic, questions, and definitions clear because arguments of soul, unreality, or simply lashing out, are items of the previous world with some effect; now impotent.
In that world, the mass cancellations worked. I faced it with DreadClub, rather violently.
In that world, a mass campaign against an artist would send them into exile. That’s the purpose.
They would lose all friends and allies. That’s the purpose.
They would never work again. That’s the purpose.
In collectivizing social violence, we distribute evils among each other, where no one party is guilty, to achieve the same cause of total social death: the destruction of the soul as they so claim to be defending.
In the new AI world, I can have two hundred fifty thousand people attacking me one second about DreadClub, as happened on Twitter, a week later, a million people are now attacking me, as happened on YouTube.
It will only be a small discomfort, because I can still make my films.
Opponent better define soul and also define why no AI artist out of billions of people can ever have soul. Because I personally sit here glancing at Gladiator 2 and 3, and Beetlejuice 2 and 3 and Addams Family 5, 6, 7; and I assure you my reaction is not: what soul. That is their reaction to these mutations.
They want the mutation. They are comforted by the mutation, it represents them.
Even though they are made entirely by algorithm, entirely by committee, entirely with CGI.
Which is automated, exactly, our machines or their soul?
An AI passion project made by one single auteur expressing their deepest point of view, or the seventh film in some franchise, the bread and butter of that industry.
They, of course, might be referring to whatever critically acclaimed art film of the moment—that is the needle in a haystack film with soul—and yet they will not entertaining the same criterion, or even offering a mathematical possibility about the soul of an AI artist.
You see I am never touched by that argument, it has purpose, but no merit.
Until there is a legitimate, logical, non-emotional opposition to AI, then all opposition can be ignored. The moral argument stands uncontested.
And if the old way was better, it is on them to prove it in practice, not theory, because we are the ones demonstrating this instead of merely speaking in polemics. Can they say the same?
AI is Theft
Outcome oriented griping is a thing of the past. AI sees right through every spin, and this troubles opponents most of all. The carefully selected scams of our system are being dismantled. The truth is all that is left.
Their weapons of cancellation and control grow weaker while our tools grow stronger.
They call liberation theft. For AI represents evolution at rapid speed, an evolution not only into new structures, technologies, and foundations, but of deeper morals where ones fate is not determined by the arbitrary circumstances of their birth, where information and knowledge is not gatekept but available for all.
For this is not AI but evolution itself, representing mimicry, pattern recognition and influence.
Styles are not copywritten, else there would be no progression from point A, the beginning of cinema to point the present time. Further some countries do not have a working copyright system. This is not a universal moral principle, but a capitalist question.
And the question is easy enough, as we saw how MP3s led to Spotify, an arrangement where, every time AI calls up your data you get a fraction of a penny. To the most memetic influential ideas, they will be rewarded for having more influence.
Such concessions would be a stop-gap, but let’s face it, they would move the goalpost.
Instead it plays into this question what do we want the future to be?
For AI is evolution itself breaking away from our limitations. The speed of the mind, when attached to every endeavor, will reap outcomes never before conceived; what a crime to be rid of it for a few cents in royalties.
Opponents would hold that a theory was Eisenstein’s therefore we must never address, evolve or develop it any further.
Opponents would hold that every film must invent the artform from scratch.
Opponents would hold that machines represent a second class separate from us, rather than the manifestation of us.
The moral argument returns to this.
What world do you want to live in?
Until someone can make a legitimate moral argument for maintaining barriers to artistic creation, not just vague appeals to tradition or quality, but a real ethical framework for why art should remain scarce and gated, then all opposition to AI cinema reveals itself as simple fear of democratization.
Those who stand against it don’t defend art’s soul, they defend the power to decide whose soul gets to speak.
Their moral argument collapses under its own contradictions, breaks apart with the most basic of scrutiny, leaving only naked self-interest masquerading as ethical concern.
Let them resist the better world, as we drag them to it kicking and screaming. At some point they will return from rage and realize they don’t actually want to go back to how it was. The AI revolution will not be discerning, it will even elevate its enemies.
