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.
If philosophy helps us understand how AI reframes realism, ethics reminds us why this matters.
Realism is not a neutral aesthetic category; it carries cultural weight. It shapes how audiences trust images, how industries value labor, and how societies negotiate truth. When AI begins generating realistic moving images, these stakes become immediate and pressing.
As AI-generated media becomes increasingly convincing, the challenge is no longer just aesthetic—it’s ethical. When the line between recorded and rendered dissolves, so too does the viewer’s ability to assess what’s been manipulated, staged, or fabricated.
The ethics of realism have always been fraught, but AI amplifies the stakes: not only can anything be made to look real—everything can be made to feel real.
Asymmetrical Knowledge
We are entering a visual culture of asymmetrical knowledge: the creators (or their tools) may know the full extent of a video’s synthetic nature, but the audience may not. The illusion of realism becomes not just an artistic choice, but a potential act of misdirection.
Realism has long been associated with credibility. A documentary shot in cinéma vérité style carries a presumption of truthfulness, even if carefully edited. AI-generated images break this presumption. A deepfake or synthetic documentary can look as “real” as captured footage, yet contain wholly fabricated events.
This introduces new dangers for political manipulation, misinformation, and propaganda. If audiences cannot distinguish generated realism from recorded reality, trust in media as a whole may erode.
Even when the intent isn’t deceptive, the ambiguity itself is destabilizing. A video might be emotionally resonant, beautifully lit, and well-composed—but if we later learn it was AI-generated, does that change how we feel about it? Should it?
These questions point to the urgent need for critical frameworks like AI Cinematic Realism, which foreground not just how media looks, but how it positions the viewer: what it asks us to believe, feel, or assume.
Likeness and Labor
Perhaps the most visible ethical issue is the use of AI to simulate performers. Synthetic actors can be generated to play roles, mimic celebrities, or even extend the careers of deceased figures. From one perspective, this appears as creative possibility—a way to tell stories that might otherwise be impossible. From another, it destabilizes the foundation of acting as labor.
If a studio can generate a convincing performance without paying a human actor, what happens to the livelihoods of performers? Questions of ownership and consent become central: does an actor own their face, their voice, their mannerisms?
Recent strikes and negotiations in Hollywood underscore the urgency of these questions, as unions seek to protect performers from having their likenesses used without control or compensation. AI Cinematic Realism posits that while the image may be synthetic, the rights involved are very real. Using generative tools to bypass consent isn’t an aesthetic choice; it’s an ethical violation.
Cultural Memory and History
AI also affects how societies remember the past.
Generating a historically “realistic” scene—say, an AI reconstruction of an event with no surviving footage—risks shaping cultural memory in ways that feel authentic but have no basis in recorded reality. While re-creations have always been part of historical storytelling, AI’s power to produce seamless, photorealistic images raises the stakes. Whose version of history will be generated? What ideological interests will guide these reconstructions?
At the same time, AI tools may empower independent filmmakers, allowing them to produce work that rivals studio production values. The ethical challenge is to ensure that such empowerment does not come at the expense of exploitation elsewhere in the pipeline—or at the expense of historical truth.
The Responsibility of Realism
To respond to these challenges, we need frameworks that link aesthetics with ethics. Realism cannot be discussed only as a matter of style or perception. In the age of AI, it must also be understood as a matter of responsibility:
- Who creates images?
- Whose labor is used or displaced?
- Whose realities are represented, and whose are erased?
These questions demand collaboration across fields—philosophy, media studies, law, and labor rights. AI Cinematic Realism is not only a theoretical category but also a site of ethical struggle. By naming this convergence, we can ensure that the study of realism in AI media remains attentive to the lived consequences of representation.
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. 
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