Cinema is a Lie. So what’s wrong with AI?

January 14th, 2026
Author: Matias Basso

When I started playing with AI filmmaking, my 12-year-old daughter became my in-house fake detector. Every time I showed her a shot or a scene, she’d squint, frown, and tell me whether it looked “real”. It became a running game. And she was right every time, even when I alternated AI and real footage. But lately, I can’t stop thinking about the implications for our perception of films at large. I thin that, soon enough, someone will make a decent, full-length feature film, that looks photo-realistic, yet is entirely generated with AI. How will we feel about that?

A Cultural Icon

The feature film still stands as the most prestigious cultural artefact of our time, the peak of popular artistic expression. Inevitably, many sci-fi films like Marvel-style blockbusters will soon be made partly or even entirely with AI, and they will likely continue to dominate the box office, attracting younger audiences, franchise fans and AI enthusiasts, whose average age is higher than you might think. Many of these films are already heavily built on CGI, so the transition will be smoother. But what about the drama? Rom-coms? Social realism? Surely, somewhere, a producer is already imagining a film with the texture and realism of ‘Lost in Translation’ or ‘Parasite’, only made entirely with AI.

So what happens to cinema as the cultural phenomenon, as the collective mirror that has shaped our ideas, lives and societies for over a century? And here I’m referring especially to live-action films, because they depict us humans in a way that reflects us directly. But will photo-realistic AI films do this for us? Or will it always feel artificial? And then, isn’t all cinema a wonderful bag of tricks? A clever series of technical lies in service of emotional truth? And once we suspend disbelief, don’t we accept the rules of the game and open ourselves to the story?

The Power of Story

As a filmmaker, I often try to analyse movies as I watch them: performance, camera work, dialogue structure, light and sound design. But my purpose dissolves as the narrative alchemy takes hold of me. I am grabbed, seduced, pulled into the story. And then, whether the cinematographer used backlight or the writer embedded subtext, becomes secondary. I become fully invested in the characters and their existential dilemmas. I just watched Armand, Norway’s Oscar entry. As it began, I asked myself: what if this realistic, authored film, with its intimate dream-like moments, had been made entirely with computers? How much would it matter to me? Again, I couldn’t sustain the thought. Within seconds, the film absorbed me completely. All this craft, AI or not, shapes our emotional experience of course. But when a film is well made, analysis falls away. In Armand, the story about a group of parents and teachers caught up in a teenage drama, organically rises above technique. The power of story is deep, ancient, it’s wired into us. So when we are exposed to a fine tale, we readily forget craft and swim in meaning. Because that is what ultimately matters to us: truth, purpose, the journey to overcome. So if the script is strong and the film is good, I believe AI will move us in a similar way, just as traditional animation does, even when it lacks the realism that AI can display. 

The Hustle is Real

There is also the question of effort. We are genetically designed to work and to appreciate work. And we don’t admire the sculpture of David only for its beauty, but also because we know that Michelangelo laboured hard to bring that beauty into being. The grind behind art matters. Humans striving to communicate thoughts and emotions to their fellow humans. That’s an essential component of art. But against some recent popular notions, AI filmmaking is hard work, too. It’s not carving stone, but it requires long hours designing the story, visualising the style, training the models, prompting thousands of images to find the right one, animating them, editing, and much more. Like anything worth doing, AI filmmaking requires vision, effort and perseverance. And as audiences begin to understand that, they will come to appreciate AI films.

Crucially, AI does not replace traditional cinema. No computer can summon the warmth of a lived performance, or the unexpected magic of collaboration on set. AI is a toolkit. A powerful one. It can extend the reach of filmmakers and lighten the burdens of production. But AI won’t serve any and all projects, and these two forms will merge and co-exist.

Earlier today, I casually showed my now 13-year-old daughter an extreme close-up of a newborn baby. “Is that me?” she gasped. It wasn’t. It was an image I had generated in Midjourney after several rounds of prompting and upscaling. It fooled her. It moved her. And that alone tells us something huge about what’s coming. My bet for a decent, photorealistic, emotionally resonant, entirely AI-generated feature film? 2027.