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.
Lately, I’ve been returning to a deceptively simple question: What does realism mean in AI-generated cinema?
It is easy to marvel at how today’s tools simulate cinematic qualities—depth of field, natural light, human gestures, ambient soundscapes. The outputs can feel strikingly photographic. But cinematic realism has never been just about looking real. It is about feeling real. And, more than that, it is about how the image relates to the world.
Currently, however, we are trapped in a binary way of seeing AI video—and it is suffocating the art form before it has a chance to breathe.
On one side is technical celebration: the demo culture. This is the breathless pursuit of higher resolution, smoother frame rates, and temporal consistency. In this framework, AI video is judged by a single, dull metric: fidelity to physics. Does the water splash correctly? Do the fingers obey anatomy?
On the other side is ontological panic: the deepfake narrative. Here, synthetic media is framed almost exclusively as a vector for deception. AI video is judged by a single, fearful metric: danger to truth. Is this trying to trick me? Is this fake news?
These frameworks fail to describe what is actually happening when a creator collaborates with a latent space. They reduce a new art form to either a physics simulation or a forgery.
I propose a new paradigm: AI Cinematic Realism.
Beyond Capture and Simulation
To understand this shift, we must let go of one of the defining dogmas of the twentieth century: the photographic trace. For over a hundred years, realism has been tied to a mechanical event—light striking film or a sensor. An image was considered real because something happened in front of a lens.
AI video has no lens. It has no sensor. It captures no event.
Judging AI video by how closely it resembles photography is like judging a painting by how well it behaves as a sculpture. The rubric is wrong. AI video is not a capture of the world; it is a construction of thought. It is not indexical; it is ideational.
In AI Cinematic Realism, realism does not mean “this looks like footage of a real event.” It means “this feels like an authentic emotional experience.”
The Real in Synthetic Cinema
In my own work as an AI filmmaker, I’ve been drawn to scenes that emulate the quiet, layered, emotionally grounded qualities of realist cinema. The tools are generative. The images are synthetic. But the creative impulse is deeply human: How do we represent what it means to be alive in time, in space, in relation to others?
And here lies the central tension this book explores: Can AI-generated cinema move us—not just visually, but emotionally? Can it make us feel, reflect, or care? Or does its realism only go skin-deep?
This isn’t just a technical question. It is a question about meaning, perception, and what we believe to be real. When we see an AI-generated face register pain or joy, what exactly are we responding to? Is it performance? Projection? Pattern recognition? Does it matter?
These are questions about how we experience images—and how we make meaning from them when there is no lived moment behind the lens. They challenge us to think about authenticity, spectatorship, and emotional truth in a cinematic space built entirely by algorithms.
Cinematic Truth
To navigate this new terrain, we need to stop asking, “Is this real?” That is a forensic question.
The more meaningful question—the question of cinematic truth—is: “Is this true?”
Does it carry narrative truth? Emotional weight? Does it use the unique affordances of the machine—its hallucinations, fluidity, and dream logic—to say something a camera never could?
That is the promise of AI Cinematic Realism. It is not a replacement for cinema. It is a new language for it. Realism is not just a matter of visual technique. It is a way of attending to the world—of witnessing presence, emotion, and ambiguity with care. Even when that world is entirely machine-made.
If these ideas resonate with you, the full manifesto explores the intersection of film theory, practice, and ethics in greater detail.
Joni Gutierrez, Ph.D. 
Leave a comment