At the intersection of AI and film, generative tools are fundamentally changing our relationship with the moving image. This excerpt from my book, AI Cinematic Realism, dives into those shifts to help define the future of cinematic truth. 

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AI Cinematic Realism is not a style to imitate but a genre to invent.

In the current discourse, there is a pervasive myth: that the AI creator is passive. That they are merely a “prompt typist,” feeding words into a black box and waiting for a slot machine payout. This view reduces the artist to a consumer and the creative act to a transaction.

If we accept this view, then AI video is indeed just automation—a way to fill screens with “content” without human intention.

But AI Cinematic Realism rejects this premise. It asserts that the maker is not a prompt typist but a moral agent.

Accountable Authorship

In this new terrain, authorship is no longer defined by the physical labor of the camera—the crouching, the focus-pulling, the lighting. It is defined by choice and consequence.

AI also unsettles the idea of authorship in other ways. A generative model trained on thousands of screenplays can produce dialogue that feels natural, even witty. But who is the author? The algorithm? The engineers who built it? The writers whose scripts were ingested into its training data?

Cinematic realism is often tied to authorial vision—the director’s eye, the screenwriter’s craft. AI-generated realism raises the specter of works without clear authors, assembled instead from vast cultural databases. The ethical stakes here are not only about credit and compensation but about the cultural meaning of originality in an age of synthetic media.

This is why Accountable Authorship is one of the three core commitments of this genre. The maker must accept that each choice carries consequences—for representation, for labor, and for the audience’s trust. You are not absolved of responsibility just because the machine “did it.” You are the one who prompted it, curated it, and published it.

The Three Commitments

AI Cinematic Realism refuses to equate plausibility with polish. It treats realism as an inquiry before it becomes a genre. The questions are not only how an image persuades, but why it is made that way, and who bears responsibility for its consequences.

Three commitments define the genre:

1. Ontological Stakes: What must a fabricated image mean, and for whom? AI Cinematic Realism probes how memory, affect, and ambiguity govern reality claims when there is no physical record to anchor them.
2. Accountable Authorship: The maker is not a prompt typist but a moral agent. Each choice carries consequences—for representation, for labor, and for the audience’s trust.
3. Emotional Plausibility: A scene must hold under felt scrutiny. The test is whether the moment persuades, not whether the pixels convince.

Genre as Intervention

Realist movements have always arisen in defiance of spectacle.

Italian Neorealism left the studio for the street, rejecting the gloss of the “white telephone” films to find truth in the rubble of post-war Italy. Dogme 95 stripped cinema of its excess—no artificial lighting, no added sound—to recover its core.

Each movement tied tools to values.

AI Cinematic Realism extends this lineage into synthetic production. It defines tools by intent, not intent by tools. As a genre, it resists the flattening churn of recombined tropes. It asks makers to foreground ambiguity, ethical friction, and affective nuance.

It becomes a pedagogy of making—where generation is guided by ethical authorship, not just technical fluency.

Declaring AI Cinematic Realism as a genre is not only an aesthetic claim but an institutional one. It invites peer review, syllabi, and communities of practice. It urges universities, festivals, and policy frameworks to treat synthetic media not just as a technical frontier, but as a cultural and ethical terrain.

It unsettles the tired story of AI as mere automation. Instead, it frames synthetic media as a site where care, intention, and philosophical depth can—and must—be authored.

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If these ideas resonate with you, the full manifesto explores the intersection of film theory, practice, and ethics in greater detail. 

You can access the AI Cinematic Realism book on Amazon.