There’s no arguing the utilize of artificial intelligence in film-making is getting a bad rap. Last week’s unveiling of Hollywood’s first AI “actress
There’s no arguing the utilize of artificial intelligence in film-making is getting a bad rap. Last week’s unveiling of Hollywood’s first AI “actress”, Tilly Norwood, generated howls of protest from actors’ unions across the UK and US, where the industry is still reeling from last year’s 118-day strike over, among other issues, the threat of AI.
And earlier this week, Australia’s Productivity Commission was pilloried by Liberals and Greens alike for failing to recognise the dire impact AI may have on the country’s innovative industries.
In May, during heated discussions at the Cannes film festival, the industry was warned it was on a slippery slope, with AI threatening jobs, copyright protections and the integrity of the innovative process.
But the film industry is far from united against AI; not everyone believes its rapid advance is eroding the very essence of human storytelling. “The wave is coming and it’s impossible to stop it,” one producer told a Cannes roundtable. “Our only option is to surf on it.”
Now, one of Australia’s most decorated film-makers is getting on his board: acclaimed Mad Max director and producer George Miller.
“AI is arguably the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image,” Miller tells the Guardian. “As a film-maker, I’ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things.”
Miller is about to lead the judging panel at the Omni 1.0 AI film festival, Australia’s first fully fledged award festival for wholly AI-generated films. He joined the jury out of “intense curiosity” about the evolving role of AI in storytelling – and his interest goes beyond the technology. AI, he believes, is part of a deeper philosophical shift in our understanding of innovative authorship.
“It’s the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about,” he says. “It strikes me how this debate echoes earlier moments in art history.”
He likens our current moment to the Renaissance, when the introduction of oil paint “gave artists the freedom to revise and enhance their work over time”.
“That shift sparked controversy – some argued that true artists should be able to commit to the canvas without corrections, others embraced the new flexibility,” Miller says. “A similar debate unfolded in the mid-19th century with the arrival of photography. Art has to evolve. And while photography became its own form, painting continued. Both changed, but both endured. Art changed.”
The Omni AI film festival’s founders, Aryeh Sternberg and Travis Rice, are pitching November’s event as a bold bid to cement Australia’s reputation as a global hub for AI-generated cinema; a meeting point for film-makers, technologists and creatives to explore how storytelling evolves when human imagination intersects with machine learning – and to thrash out the ethical dilemmas that come with it.
Each submission will be rigorously screened for plagiarism and assessed under strict ethical guidelines, ensuring that technological innovation is matched by artistic integrity.
Such is the rate of acceleration in the technology’s capabilities, Rice says the quality of the hundreds of entries submitted to Omni 1.0 has increased dramatically since he and Sternberg staged Omni 0.5, a dress rehearsal of sorts, back in April.
The benchmark for selection? “Whether a film could plausibly be screened on mainstream platforms like Netflix or HBO,” Rice says.
Highlight reel from the OMNI international AI film festival held in April 2025 – video
As a judge, Miller says he will be watching out for what the industry has come to refer to as “AI slop”. Emotional resonance – not technical novelty – is the true measure of any film’s worth, he says.
“Some films you forget the moment you get to the car park. Others stay with you the rest of your life and they become part of the way you perceive the world.”
While critics often argue that machine-made cinema will be emotionally hollow or formulaic, Rice – a curator working at the intersection of art, film and technology – believes that critique can be equally applied to what is currently being made by humans.
“That [idea of a] human ‘special something’ is compelling, but I also think that there is a ton of already hollow, very vapid, very empty content on any of the channels that we watch,” Rice says. “We’re committed to showcasing compelling narratives, not just flashy tech demos or viral clips or a silly throwaway meme.”
While Miller believes AI is unlikely to ever be capable of fully replicating the collaborative qualities of human performance, he sees its accessibility as a gamechanger.
“It will make screen storytelling available to anyone who has a calling to it,” he says. “I know kids not yet in their teens using AI. They don’t have to raise money. They’re making films – or at least putting footage together. It’s way more egalitarian.”
And democratic, Rice argues: AI can give voice to creators in regions where they may otherwise be silenced by governments or targeted while filming, as has been witnessed recently in Iran in the cases of director Mohammad Rasoulof and film-makers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha.
Among the submissions Omni 1.0 has received, for instance, is one from Malaysia about police corruption there.
“This particular story … would be very dangerous to make in Malaysia [without AI],” Rice says.
As for the threat AI poses to human employment, Miller takes a Darwinian view: “The first film I made, Mad Max, had 30 people on the credits. The last film I made [Furiosa] had over 1,000 people credited, and a huge number of those were CGI visual effects artists.”
He recalls a recent conversation he had with a group of fellow film-makers, one of whom had just seen the 2015 British documentary Listen to Me Marlon. The documentary makers had used what was, in 2015, cutting edge software to create a 3D rendering of Marlon Brando reciting Macbeth.
“In the future, anybody who wants to pay the rights for it can have Marlon Brando in their movie,” this film-maker had enthused to Miller. But another director – “younger and wiser than most of us”, Miller recalls – disagreed.
“[They] replied yes, you’ll have a character who looks like Marlon Brando, but you’ll have nothing close to Marlon Brando. You won’t have the engagement, that performances arise out of the collaborative effort between other actors and directors and writers and so on. You will not have the essence of Brando.
“And that applies to everything – whether it’s a song, a novel, or whatever.
“You won’t have that human essence.”
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