The embrace of artificial intelligence by the BiFan film festival in South Korea is no longer new, as its conference and AI film competition this month amply demonstrated. But the event might serve as a lesson – or warning – to those who would rather bury their heads in the sand.

“AI filmmaking is not tomorrow’s fantasy, but is already today’s reality,” said Korean technologist-turned filmmaker Roy Oh, who presented Color My Garden, a biographical drama about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The 20-minute film, which drew mixed responses from professionals, was generated and musically scored inside one week by a single person.

Admittedly, Oh’s three or so years of experience with the tools makes him an AI filmmaking veteran. But others are racing to join him in a fashion that could either disrupt – or democratise, depending on one’s point of view – today’s film and TV industries.

After an appearance at 2024’s debut BiFan conference, Estonian tech consultant Sten Kristian Saluveer returned (virtually) to highlight just how rapidly the technology and its adoption for film production has been.

Whereas this time last year the number of AI filmmaking tools was limited, there are now thousands, offering additional specialised functions by the week. Training programmes were just beginning, but a year later education platform Curious Refuge can claim over 4,000 ‘graduates’ from over 170 countries and an AI Director or Studio Manager is now one of the industry’s hottest jobs.

A year after the Hollywood strike in favour of protecting talent, AI-generated images and sounds have reached the mainstream and achieved critical acceptability – in award-winning movies including Emilia Perez and The Brutalist.

The U.S. Screen Actors Guild has approved its first AI film (Echo Hunter) and others have been presented in prestigious festivals. These include: Ancestra directed by Eliza McNitt and produced by Darren Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup, which premiered at Tribeca; and Primitive Diversity, an 80-minute feature about image technology, politics and human flaws, which launched at the Rotterdam festival in February.

Wonderment at the possibilities of AI seems to be a recurring theme for the pioneers – BiFan’s opening film About a Hero was not only scripted by AI technology, it discusses and challenges the 2016 assertion by Werner Herzog that a computer can never produce a film as good as a human-made one.

This month too, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled an AI Action Plan that clears the way for massive investment in the sector, adds a layer of regulation and seeks to banish wokeness.

While government-level issues are being thrown up by the barely restrained AI arms race between U.S. and Chinese tech giants and by the need for a balance between stimulation and regulation of the sector, the new content industry is already emerging.

Saluveer argued that: capital is flowing into new AI studios, an upgrade from artists working on their own; that native AI production is being implemented by major studios, a step on from simpler AI-enhanced workflows; and that the tech is disrupting and sometimes reversing the conventional development-scripting-image generation chronology of storytelling and production.

For individuals and small-medium-sized countries alike, AI should be embraced and realistic strategies adopted, Saluveer suggests. Above all, they should give themselves a skills upgrade. The alternative may be oblivion. – By Patrick Frater