A Filipino man walks through the backyard of his childhood home in rural Hawai’i, his footsteps swooshing through the grass. Birds chirp in the tropical din as he approaches a shrine at the base of a starfruit tree. He bends to inspect a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman with a 1950s side part. Suddenly, a gust of wind shakes the tree’s branches, knocking over the shrine’s contents. The man steps back, trips on a root, and hits his head.
When he awakens, he is in a dark, misty forest. A woman wearing a clay mask stands over him, brandishing a sword. “Who are you who dares to sleep under the sacred tree?” she asks in Ilocano, a Philippine language widely spoken in Hawaii’s Filipino community, while holding the sword at his throat. He replies that he is lost and turns to flee. She chases, alternating between running and floating through the air. He falls again. She advances, sword held high. He throws a rock at her, shattering the clay mask and revealing half her face. “Mom?” he asks.
This is the opening of “Murmuray,” a short film by independent filmmaker Brad Tangonan. Everything about this film felt like his previous work, from the tactile nature shots to the dreamlike desaturated highlights. The only difference was that he made it using AI.
Tangonan was one of 10 filmmakers to participate in Google Flow Sessions, a five-week cohort that gave creatives access to Google’s suite of AI tools to produce short films, including Gemini, the image generator Nano Banana Pro, and the film generator Veo.
Each film differed in scope. Hal Watmough’s “You’ve Been Here Before” blended hyperreal, lifelike visuals with cartoonish stylization to playfully explore the importance of a morning routine. Tabitha Swanson’s “The Antidote to Fear is Curiosity” is a more esoteric, philosophical conversation about our relationship with AI and ourselves.
None of these short films, screened at Soho House New York late last year, felt like AI slop. Each independent filmmaker said that, in these cases, AI had enabled them to tell a story they otherwise would not have had the budget or time to tell.
“I see all of these tools, whether it be a camera you can pick up or generative AI, as ways for an artist to express what they have in their mind,” Tangonan said after the screenings.
This AI-is-just-another-tool argument is certainly the message Google is trying to underscore. Google is not wrong; AI will increasingly be part of a creator’s toolkit as video generation products improve. In 2025, companies like Google, Runway, OpenAI, Kling, Luma AI, and Higgsfield progressed far beyond the uncanny, prompt-based novelties of the year prior. The AI video industry, with billions in venture capital dollars in tow, is now moving from prototype to post-production.
This era of AI abundance that provides tools to “democratize access” to the film industry also threatens to erase jobs and creativity, smothering them under an avalanche of low-effort slop. The existential stakes have pitted creatives against one another. Those who engage with AI risk being labeled as complicit; those who do not risk becoming obsolete.
The question is not whether the tools belong in the toolkit – they are coming, whether we like it or not. Instead it is: what kind of filmmaking survives when the industry pushes for speed and scale over quality? And what happens when individual artists use the same tools to make something that actually matters?
The arguments against AI in filmmaking are plentiful. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said last October that he would rather die than use generative AI to make a film. James Cameron said in a recent interview the idea of generating actors and emotions with prompts is “horrifying,” and that generative AI is only capable of spitting out a blended average of everything that has ever been done by humans before. Werner Herzog said the films he has seen created by AI “have no soul.”
Cameron and Herzog’s thesis is that AI is taking the wheel of creation out of human hands and could not possibly be used to create a representation of lived experience.
“It’s very easy to be angry with AI as a concept in the machine, but it’s harder to be angry with someone that’s made something personal,” Watmough said.
Tangonan, who describes “Murmuray” as a “family story,” agrees. “AI is a facilitator,” Tangonan said. “I’m still making all the creative decisions. When people see ‘AI slop’ online, it’s a lot of lowest common denominator stuff. And, yeah, if you hand over the keys to AI, that’s what you’re going to get. But if you have a voice and a creative perspective and a style, then you’re going to get something different.”
Using AI in filmmaking does not mean just prompting a film into existence. Tangonan, for example, wrote the script without AI and gathered visual references for a shot list. He then fed that content into Nano Banana Pro to generate images that matched his style and served as the foundation for video generation.
Filmmaker Keenan MacWilliam also took pains to ensure her short film “Mimesis,” a fictional guided meditation, was a true extension of her visual language. MacWilliam wrote the script and recorded her own voice. The images all came from her own collection of scanned flora and fauna.
“I spent a lot of time learning how to make apps that were built with my own dataset, and then used those as reference points,” MacWilliam said, adding that she worked with her long-time composer and sound designer. “I made a choice to avoid using AI for anything that I could have shot with a camera or ask my collaborators to animate.”
That was a common thread among the filmmakers – the desire to use AI only when it was not possible to rely on other humans, or when the strange nature of AI generations served the story. For example, Sander van Bellegem’s “Melongray” explored the acceleration of life through trippy visualizations. In one shot, a salamander transforms into a balloon, an idea inspired by how AI allowed him to push the limits of imagination.
Today’s film studio budgets are being squeezed by rising filming costs, the pivot to streaming, and risk-averse corporate consolidation. Big spends are saved for predictable revenue generators, and original mid-budget movies have all but been abandoned. Adding AI to the mix risks exacerbating the scarcity mindset of studios to the point where they might try to replace anything that can be replaced – art and quality be damned.
However, the efficiencies AI brings could also lower barriers and make it easier for film studios to produce original work. Even Cameron noted that generative AI could make VFX cheaper, which could lead to more imaginative sci-fi and fantasy films.
The shot in “Murmuray” where the woman flies through the forest would have taken expensive VFX or complex rigging on set, both out of budget for a short film. But even filmmakers who see the benefits in efficiency understand the risks to artistic expression. “I think efficiency in general is not the best friend of creativity,” MacWilliam said.
For independent filmmakers, having so many powerful tools at their disposal is a blessing and a curse. It “democratizes access,” but it also means working alone. The more you can do yourself, the less reason there is to collaborate.
“I know I’m a one man band, and I just made all this by myself…but that should never be the way that anyone tells a story or makes a film,” Watmough said, noting that an actor friend contributed a voice. “It should be a collaborative process.”
The filmmakers found themselves suddenly playing set designer, lighting director, costumer – roles requiring expertise they did not have. It was frustrating and draining, pulling them away from the work they actually cared about.
The filmmakers also said they would rather not replace actors with AI, though some said AI-generated actors are an inevitability for smaller studios. The tools exist, and are improving, to generate actors, their emotions, and movements.
“In an ideal world, I would work with real actors and some cinematographer and department heads and the full crew to make something amazing and use AI to complement that to be able to do things that we can’t do on set, whether for budgetary or time reasons,” Tangonan said.
“I think making any creative work that uses new technology always requires a certain kind of gut check and a willingness to have conversations around the work,” MacWilliam said. “These are tools. How are you going to use the tool? Are you going to be ethical about it? Are you going to ask questions? Are you going to be transparent and share knowledge?”
But many do not see AI tools as neutral. Labor replacement aside, there are copyright concerns. AI video generation companies have faced questions about whether they are training on copyrighted films and stock footage without permission. Then there are environmental impacts, with estimates suggesting generating seconds of AI video can consume significant electricity.
Unsurprisingly, many of the filmmakers said they face stigma for experimenting with AI. “Whenever I do post things online, a lot of my filmmaking colleagues have a very knee jerk reaction to it that we should all hold the line and not use any of these tools,” Tangonan said. “I just don’t agree with that.”
If filmmakers are too afraid to discuss how AI can and should be used and what the ethical boundaries are, then the conversation risks being decided for them. Not by artists trying to use it responsibly, but by efficiency-crazed studios that care more about bottom lines than art.
“The film industry is floundering because people aren’t innovating and everything costs too much. We need tools like this for it to survive,” said Watmough. “I think it’s essential that people engage with it because if we don’t, then it’s going to become something we don’t recognize, and that’s not sustainable.”