Hollywood s obsession with AI-enabled perfection is making movies less human

Get the Full StoryFrom digitally enhancing accents to resurrecting the dead, AI is reshaping film in pursuit of impossible standards.

The notion of authenticity in the movies has moved a step beyond the merely realistic. More and more, expensive and time-consuming fixes to minor issues of screen realism have become the work of statistical data renderings the visual or aural products of generative artificial intelligence. Deployed for effects that actors used to have to create themselves, with their own faces, bodies, and voices, filmmakers now deem these fixes necessary because they are more authentic than what actors can do with just their imaginations, wardrobe, makeup, and lighting. The paradox is that in this scenario, authentic means inhuman: The further from actual humanity these efforts have moved, the more we see them described by filmmakers as perfect.

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