Cinema and artificial intelligence, two innovations looking at each other

Cinema and artificial intelligence share a similar trajectory: disruptive innovations first decried, then becoming transformative industries of our relationship to the world.

Parallel revolutions, from contempt to industry

Cinema shares with artificial intelligence a fundamental characteristic: that of being a technology that, from its very appearance, has disrupted an entire field of human activities in a very short time, giving birth to a considerable industry. These two innovations certainly differ in their profound nature - cinema mechanically reproduces the movement of the world while artificial intelligence generates reasoning through calculations - but they share this capacity for radical transformation of what preceded them.

This comparison appears all the more relevant to me as cinema was initially perceived with a suspicion similar to that which surrounds AI today. Established theater artists considered cinematography as an impure, almost shameful practice. Acting in a film at the beginning of the 20^th century was equivalent, in the minds of theater actors, to what participating in pornographic productions would represent today - an activity devoid of any artistic value. The first screenings took place in fairground booths, places of popular entertainment where people came to revel before these new machines that offered a fascinating and new vision of the world.

This popular fascination for a technology despised by cultural elites resonates strangely with the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), explained how each new reproduction technology disrupts not only the modes of artistic production but also our very perception of art. AI, like cinema in its time, confronts us with this question: what happens to creation when the machine becomes co-creator?

The gendered history of a nascent industry

The initial lack of prestige of cinema had an unexpected consequence: it allowed women to occupy a predominant place in it. Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female director in cinema history, directed more than a thousand films between 1896 and 1920. Lois Weber became Hollywood’s highest-paid director in 1916. This pioneering period saw dozens of women occupy positions as directors, producers, screenwriters, and editors.

However, as soon as cinema revealed its economic potential, thanks to the ticketing system and the reproduction of copies allowing massive distribution, the industry was gradually captured by patriarchy. This process of masculinization of the film industry, analyzed by historian Karen Ward Mahar in “Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood” (2006), illustrates a recurring phenomenon: innovative creative spaces become male bastions as soon as they generate economic and symbolic power.

It must be acknowledged that this male domination persists in the contemporary film industry, despite virtuous initiatives. Working methods, subjects treated, financing systems remain structured by logics of domination that the industry struggles to question. This history invites vigilance: how can we avoid AI creativity reproducing these same patterns of exclusion? The first signs are concerning - key positions in AI companies remain predominantly male and sexist biases are legion in generative AIs - but the opportunity still exists to build differently.

Cinema as an anticipatory mirror of thinking machines

From its beginnings, cinema has been fascinated by other machines, establishing a visionary dialogue with future technologies. Georges Méliès was already exploring in 1902 with “A Trip to the Moon” our relationship with machines and technological exploration. Fritz Lang, with “Metropolis” (1927), questioned the consequences of automation on the human condition, prefiguring very contemporary debates.

20^th-century cinematic science fiction, nourished by the literature of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, or Arthur C. Clarke, developed sophisticated reflection on the advent of artificial intelligences. “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick (1968) remains emblematic: HAL 9000 embodies this exploration of knowledge itself, of the link between the tool made by man and its intrinsic violence. The intelligent machine that decides to eliminate its creators to ensure its own survival poses a fundamental philosophical question about autonomy and artificial consciousness.

Many other works have enriched this reflection. I cite two more: “Terminator” by James Cameron (1984), which explores the temporal paradoxes of a future war between humans and machines. And “Tron” by Steven Lisberger (1982), which takes us literally inside the computer machine, where human characters coexist with programs. The “Matrix” tetralogy by the Wachowskis (1999-2021) builds on “Tron” and goes further: what if our reality were just a simulation operated by machines? These films are much more than entertainment; they constitute, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek expresses it, philosophical laboratories where our anxieties and hopes about technology are experimented with. The book Matrix, machine philosophique (collective, directed by Alain Badiou and Elie During, 2003) is a beautiful example of this.

Creation in the era of human-machine collaboration

The current film milieu lives in a form of corporatist panic in the face of AI, fearing job losses and creative standardization. Yet this reaction exactly reproduces the fears expressed by theater artists faced with nascent cinema at the end of the 19^th century. History teaches us that new technologies do not destroy art but transform it, creating new forms of expression and new professions.

I was able to directly observe these transformations by facilitating during 2024 filmmaking workshops with artificial intelligences for about 400 participants. This experience allowed me to see that the relationship to the tool is fundamental. Just as Rembrandt ground his pigments to create his unique colors, just as filmmakers choose their cameras, films, or sensors according to their artistic vision, creators who use AI develop an intimate relationship with their tools. The quality of dialogue with artificial intelligence, the choice of models, the formulation of prompts become an integral part of the creative process.

The tool is no longer just an extension of our body, as the camera extends our eye, but a creative interlocutor. This collaboration poses unprecedented aesthetic questions: who is the author of a work co-created with AI? How can we preserve artistic singularity in the face of risks of algorithmic standardization?

Toward new narrative and aesthetic forms

The transformations that are announced go beyond simple technical evolution. We are perhaps heading toward films personalized for each viewer, toward a fusion between cinema and video games, toward narrative forms that we cannot yet imagine. Janet Murray, in “Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace” (1997), anticipated these adaptive narratives where the viewer becomes co-author of the work.

These mutations should not lead us to want to reproduce the films of before with new tools. The interest lies in invention, in discovering new ways of doing, new visions of the world, new places for us in the creative process. Jobs will disappear, certainly, but others will emerge: creative prompters, sculptors of generative models, choreographers of narrative algorithms, etc.

Experimentation is the compass, in my view. Playing, trying, failing, starting again - this is how we can make these new technologies instruments in service of humanity. Cinema and artificial intelligence, these two machines for making worlds, can help us share our stories, create common ground, and mutually enrich ourselves with our visions. Together, they participate in the perpetual renewal of our gaze and in the culture of wonder that constitutes, it seems to me, the richest sublimation of human experience.