Lights, Camera, Automation: The Uncertain Future of AI in Film and TV

In the early days of cinema, making a film required geography, money, and access.
If you didn’t live near Los Angeles or London, if you didn’t have the right background or connections, if you weren’t from “the industry”—you probably didn’t make movies. Not the kind that travelled, anyway.

Today, those barriers are eroding. But not because of social change. Because of software. AI tools are entering the creative bloodstream of film and television production—not gradually, but all at once. They’re storyboarding. Colour-grading. Animating. Compositing. Writing. Casting. Soundtracking. They’re producing concept art that rivals top-tier studios, and video snippets that—while not perfect yet—are closing the gap, day by day.

For many, this is a triumph. For others, a quiet death. As with most technological shifts, both things may be true at once. Let's unpack what's happening.

The Problems, at a Glance

As AI encroaches ever-further into film and television, some notable problems come to mind first. If you're in the industry, you may well be seeing some of these play out already. If not outright negatives, these are complicated discussion points.

1. Collapse of mid-tier creative companies. Sure, AI is enabling indie creators and top-tier studios, but it's squeezing the middle market.

2. Erosion of artistic apprenticeship. If AI fills in the gaps, fewer young people learn by doing behind the scenes.

3. Risk of creative homogenisation. When style can be prompted, does vision flatten to what the tool has seen? Will we see less creativity in production with the rise of AI tooling? More on this later in the article.

4. Undermining of physical, local, or embodied art. Filmmaking has always been somewhere—a set, a crew, a location. What happens when it’s nowhere? Will the role of Location Manager fade into obscurity, for instance?

5. Economic gatekeeping shifts, not disappears. The tools are free, but visibility, virality, and platform control still favour the well-resourced. The studios with the biggest pockets may monopolise, just the way they've always done.

The Positives, at a Glance

Now, let's take a look at some intriguing positive outcomes of AI in film and television. These are my own personal opinions, so please feel free to counter-argue or add your own thoughts by leaving a comment.

1. Radical access for outsiders. AI lowers the barrier to entry—meaning people without funding, formal training, or industry connections can now prototype ideas, build pitches, or even produce polished short films. This is especially important in an industry long dominated by class, geography, and nepotism.

2. Faster idea-to-screen velocity. Creative people can move from concept to execution much more quickly. AI can generate storyboards, concept art, trailers, mood pieces, sound design, or location mockups in a day—tools that once required a team and weeks of production. Whether this is a positive or negative is up for debate. Is speed good, bad or neutral?

3. Empowerment of solo and small-team creators. Filmmaking has historically required crews. Now, a single individual or small group can produce near-studio-level content by leveraging AI for editing, effects, audio, casting assistance, dubbing, and more. This changes what’s viable at the indie level.

4. Global storytelling comes into reach. AI translation, voice cloning, and subtitling tools will open new markets and allows culturally specific stories to travel further than ever before.

5. More room for artistic experimentation. When costs drop, risk tolerance rises. Filmmakers can try weirder ideas, more niche concepts, and stylistic experiments because failure is less expensive. This could lead to a creative renaissance outside of traditional commercial formats.

The Case for Creative Liberation

Now, let's attempt to flesh out either side of the debate. We'll begin with what’s beautiful—it's usually a good place to start. For decades, the film and television industry has been a gate-kept arena. If you didn’t graduate from a particular school, live in a particular city, or speak a particular cultural dialect, your odds of making it were slim. The work wasn’t just hard—it was far away.

AI is changing that. A person with no industry connections, a decent laptop, and something urgent to say can now produce moodboards, shoot lists, location comps, casting sketches, motion tests, music mockups—all before they’ve spent a pound. The slow, grinding process of translating vision into pitch into budget into permission? It’s collapsing.

Suddenly, a teenager in Nairobi can visualise a sci-fi pilot that looks like it came out of Lucasfilm. A playwright in Leeds can mock up a trailer. A documentary filmmaker in Manila can cut multilingual interviews with real-time AI voice translation. The scale of what’s possible—individually, independently—is expanding. This isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a redistribution of creative power. And that should matter. Especially in an industry historically shaped by nepotism, location bias, and legacy privilege. If even a sliver of the visual storytelling landscape becomes accessible to those who previously had no seat at the table, that’s not disruption—it’s restoration.

We like to say “talent is everywhere, opportunity is not.” This may be the first time the tools themselves try to level that equation.

What we Stand to Lose

It’s tempting to end there. To celebrate this shift as a final breaking open of the castle gates. But if we’re honest, the same tools that empower also erode, and they may erode exactly the conditions that make creative industries worth entering in the first place.

Film and television have always been collective disciplines. Built on apprenticeship. On interdependence. On the strange, messy alchemy of teams—grips, editors, sound designers, lighting techs, costume runners—learning together, arguing, discovering, and occasionally making magic. When an AI fills in the gaps, that ecosystem begins to collapse. What once required a dozen skilled people might now be handled by one director and a prompt window. Therefore, it's not just jobs that are at risk—it's craft. It's the long arc of getting good at something slow. That's what I meant earlier when I asked whether speed, as a force, is positive, negative or neutral.

There’s also the mid-tier to consider. Big studios may survive by integrating AI into larger pipelines. Indies may thrive through agility. But the mid-sized shops—the visual FX companies, the regional post houses, the boutique production team, are at risk. Their value was always speed, scale, and technical excellence. What happens when software offers all three?

And then there’s something harder to define: the loss of the real. Of the location. Of the physical. Of the tension between budget and vision that often forced creative ingenuity. When everything can be simulated, fewer things are built by hand and with the aforementioned tenson at play. And perhaps, what’s built lasts longer than what’s rendered.

The Homogenisation Problem

Another quiet risk is that of sameness. AI tools, however magical, are still trained on what’s already been made. They are inherently referential. When prompted to create something “cinematic,” they lean toward existing norms—well-lit faces, shallow depth, symmetry, the language of prestige. This doesn’t mean AI can’t be original. But it does mean that originality is not its instinct. It follows taste. It doesn’t invent it. I unpack this issue in more depth in The Patterned Mind: What AI Can Teach Us About Human Creativity.

When everyone has access to the same toolset, and those tools are tuned to what’s been proven to work, we run the risk of flattening vision into pattern. Of turning creativity into reproduction at scale. Not because people are lazy. But because sameness is seductive, safe and gets clicks. It looks like the thing we already know. In an age of abundance, what becomes scarce is distinction. AI will not solve that for us.

The New Arms Race: Ideas and Taste

But here’s where it gets interesting again. Because the more accessible production becomes, the more valuable original thought becomes. If everyone can make a scene, the scene itself is no longer the achievement. It’s the concept. The framing. The feeling. The why behind it. We may be entering an era where your taste—not your technical skill—is what sets you apart.

This doesn’t mean craft dies. The best creators will still master lighting, story, rhythm, and tone. But they may no longer master them through traditional ladders. Instead, they’ll direct the machine—shaping its outputs with a clarity that comes not from menus, but from meaning. The prompt becomes a form of authorship. The idea becomes the bottleneck. Vision becomes the thing you can’t automate.

In a strange way, this may bring us back to something more personal. The tools disappear. What’s left is the signal—the clarity of what you’re trying to say, and whether anyone else feels it too. If you like this idea, you may enjoy The Return of the Ideas Person.

A Closing Reflection

We’re not watching film and TV get destroyed. We’re watching it be reformatted—at speed, and at scale. There will be losses, and they’ll matter. Jobs. Traditions. Local economies. The kind of creative intimacy that only comes from shared constraint.

But there will be gains too. New voices. Broader access. Faster paths to storytelling that would have been unthinkable even five years ago. What we’re being asked to do now is hold both truths. To advocate for the people whose livelihoods are at stake, while also championing the new dreamers who might finally get their shot. But, at least for me, the main thing to remember is that the tools may shape the medium, but they don’t define the message. That’s still ours to choose.