These filmmakers use AI. And they’re not ashamed to admit it

Blazers brushed up against streetwear. “Tonight you’re gonna hear a lot about AI,” said Mike Gioia — one of the event’s organizers and a co-founder of the AI workflow startup Pickaxe — during his introductory remarks. And for anybody who’s a filmmaker in L.A., the reality that you deal with is there are just so many hoops you have to jump through to get an idea out of your head, onto a screen.” He continued: “In the best-case scenario, what AI does is it just makes a lot simpler.” Many of the participating filmmakers emphasized what artificial intelligence software means for smaller-time creatives — people whose passion projects generally exist outside the Hollywood ecosystem subject to the recent strikes. “I wanted to make something in my room and not have to wait two or three weeks for someone to say, ‘OK, let’s do this or that,’ ” said Anna Apter, a director who set AI-generated images of children’s birthday parties to a monologue about loneliness in her short film “/Imagine.” Speaking from Paris before the event, which she wasn’t able to attend in person, she added: “I know how all these jobs can be threatened by AI. A scene from filmmakers Caleb Ward and Aminah Folli’s “Zebulon Five.” Ward runs the AI storytelling community Curious Refuge with his wife, Shelby.