A screengrab fromAstitva,winner of Best Overall Film at MAFF’25. | Photo Credit: Mumbai AI Film Festival

There is acategory error that most people make when engaging with something like the recently concluded Mumbai AI Film Festival (MAFF).

On the one hand is our response to the people organising it: men and a woman in their early 20s, who prefer to be called “boys”, so I shall do that, not entirely out of an infantilising impulse. They have framed the film festival and AI—shrouded in a solutions-orientedtech lingo—as a democratising impulse, cutting through barriers, red tape, gatekeepers, and even, perhaps, a base desire for cinema. You can make cinema simply because you want to. Or, as someone at the festival noted: “You get drunk and make a movie! WHAAT?! That is how effortless it should be.” This is largely the rhetoric around the festival and around AI: to make filmmaking frictionless.

In the process of bridging the gap between the desire to make films and realising it, the desire has itself eroded into a shadow of itself. Living in a world where solutions are constantly being created makes you wonder if the problem was misunderstood in the first place. By trying to smoothen out the path to filmmaking, the boys end up eradicating the desire for movies. The yearning for cinema is a problem that needs to be optimised for. But, abolish it, they say.

Desire exists because of a lack. When you eradicate that lack, you also eradicate desire. The question to be asked is this: is forsaken desire worth its quick realisation? AsDon Palathara argued in his essay in this magazine, AI eradicates the rigour of process to fetishise the product instead. Although AI films do have their own processes—their own hallucinations from prompts that push you down different paths—their frictions are less amenable to life’s interventions.

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Then, there is the question of the quality of the films produced. The festival had a three-day hackathon where the participants rendered their films, which were then shown at the Mumbai Opera House. The winning entries were released on X and awarded a Rs.25 lakh cash prize (the same as the top prize at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, which did not take place this year.) There was a celebrity guest list of only men, a panel of only men, and a jury of only men; AI will clearly replicate the biases of the world it attempts to reproduce. Where is human intervention?

The case of OpenAI

I shall move from the former issue to the latter, because while separate, they are in some way related. Take the case of OpenAI. When with the blessings of Elon Musk it was ripped open for the world to gawk at, the rhetorical machine went into overdrive. Karen Hao writes in Empire of AI how OpenAI began as a transparent non-profit and was later restructured to nest within it a for-profit motive. It became “competitive, secretive, and insular, even fearful of the outside world, under the intoxicating power of controlling such a paramount technology”, something that could serve its shareholders a return and its unequivocal fans an ideological hammer.

Be wary of the verbiage. The boys kept throwing around the word “revolution” liberally at the festival in their pursuit to find the “best undiscovered talent globally”, mistaking their delusions for their pitch.

The problem is twofold. First, the very rotting structure of AI has not been thought through: the ethical and moral issues with the procurement of its images and the labour of others, the fraught issue around AI labellers and their labour conditions, and not to mention the devastation to the environment that has become a shrugged footnote in the larger conversation around this technology.

The question that strikes you is, how is it solving problems when it is creating more of them?

Then, there is the question of the future itself. The AI evangelists speak of the future as one that AI will make easy, not as one that AI will create. But if anyone can make a Rs.200 crore–looking film for Rs.2 lakh, the Rs.200 crore–looking film will lose its value, and the very idea of an “expensive film” will need re-evaluation. AI asks us to fundamentally rethink categories of cinema. What will happen when a collaborative medium turns into an isolating one? When the auteur theory reaches its grotesque logical conclusion? AI cinema will not be cinema, and that is a provocation few have answers to.

As Hao argues, technology is not inevitable. It is ushered in by pouring billions of dollars into research and a rhetorical machine that pushes you to believe that this is the effortless, inescapable future. Those like me arguing against AI are not arguing against its future—which we know is certain, given the pace and power of those steering its path—but are arguing for people to pay closer attention to its present. There is rhetoric that we build from our conclusions—ones that help us pad it—and rhetoric that helps us reach our conclusions, and perhaps we should have the discernment to know which is which.

Where stories are spectacles

Then, there is the issue of the films themselves—with bleak, metallic frames, characters dead in their eyes, with smooth skin, no sense of life—where even sunlight feels synthetic. The stories are all spectacles—top shots and quick cuts and strange nightmares—filled with hollow words, hackneyed ideas, and dull voice-overs. Dystopia and horror abound because they bend easily to a quick spectacle. What is true, though, is that a lot of the non-AI—or “traditional”—films, too, have this dead look, shot in studios against green screens. When Chloe Zhao was brought in to direct a film for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she insisted on shooting in real locations, with light fresh from the one sun we have. The film’s textures bled a world so thick that when the sunset was caught in the fibre of a sweater, it felt like the weight of life pressing up against the screen.

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When Walter Benjamin wrote of the missing “aura” that results from democratising art, where we can see Rembrandt on our phones in the loo, he meant that what gets lost is presence. Art enables presence. By first turning it into a commodity, and then optimising for it, AI turns cinema into a representation of itself. Cinema should not be solved. It should be made.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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