Alexei German Jr. told an audience in Pskov that artificial intelligence will reshape cinema but will not replace it, saying film will survive as something handmade. He spoke at a creative meeting during the international film festival Western Gate, after a viewer asked whether AI threatens to replace filmmaking.
He said yes, calling it a complex era. Good AI models already work faster than humans in some areas and are sometimes just as good, he said, though so far only over short stretches. The range of professions AI can replace will keep growing, he said, but cinema will remain because people will initially reject artificial life. He predicted global discontent with AI and attempts to regulate it, including by trade unions, even as the technology gradually becomes normal. It is still possible, though harder this year, to tell a generated person from a real one, he said, but that will no longer hold true within a year.
A wave of AI-made content
German said media faces a huge wave of what he called pseudo-artistic garbage, which already exists. But he said one or two geniuses could still emerge from every hundred people producing that content, using AI to create something alive and emotional that reaches people's hearts.
Theater and cinema are always performance, he said, and audiences subconsciously empathize with the performer as well as the character, sensing that real people put warmth and effort into the work. He said theater and niche cinema made from flesh and blood will keep drawing audiences, since the personality of talented actors still matters.
Testing AI-written scripts
German said his colleagues tested neural networks this year to write text and got a relatively acceptable result, though it needed editing, was no Dostoevsky, and could not produce long text. Colleagues still felt empathy in one test, he said, and he asked whether mediocre screenwriters do much the same by compiling material. AI cannot produce genius work but can produce average work, he said, calling that a huge challenge for people. Replacing creators remains far off, he said, but digital entities may one day gain traits that let people humanize them, and AI could also hold great dangers. He said he does not know what will happen, since the industry is only at the beginning of the path.
German has directed the films Last Train, Garpastum, Paper Soldier, Under Electric Clouds, Dovlatov, The Case and Air, and the documentary The Architect: The Story of Alexei German and His Films.
