• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 19, 2025

This past weekend, I moderated two panels during SXSW at the Austin AI Film Festival. I walked away thinking about the intersection of AI and human intention.  What I settled on is that AI is simply a tool for us to use. It can never replace what we as humans do.

Not everyone agrees with me.  It's possible that some roles, especially those in media, may indeed be replaced.  I still think humans will always be one step ahead.  Most importantly, we are capable of non-linear thinking,  which means we will always have the upper hand.

Let me explain.

During those two panels, we talked about the ethics in AI filmmaking as well as the future.  The future may find more ways to leverage ethically trained models, but fundamentally, these are still trained models.  Humans are always going to be more capable of two things: creating emotion and developing ideas that break free from “training.”

Humans have souls, and when we write or create content, we tap into the soul to find ways to connect on a level that cannot be replicated.  A machine may eventually be able to mimic our eyes and facial expressions, but it is always going to be a mimic.  It will never be original. It will always be trained. 

There is no soul-to-soul connection to be created when a machine tries to mirror what a human can do, how we look, or what we can create.  We can train a machine to look a certain way, and that can be helpful in filmmaking or creative execution for advertising, but it can never truly create that connection.

Which leads me to training.  AI is all about training.  I realize that eventually an AI can “think for itself,” but it will always be based on the data it was trained on.  Humans are not necessarily linear thinkers, and therefore we are very capable, even likely, to not follow our own “training” and come up with completely new ideas.  What’s more, we are creative thinkers, and we go above and beyond the information and tools that lie in front of us, which means we will always use AI as a tool and find ways to play off it to create something new.

Yes, we have created these systems.  Yes, these systems will get more complex and may even take on a life of their own, but we are very adept at building on anything that is laid out for us. In that regard, AI is nothing more than the most powerful of tools that we have laid out in front of us, and we will always build on top of the AI.

So, to that end, I am not worried about the long-term implications of AI because I think we always find ways to use tools in new and distinct ways.  AI is one of those tools that shows much promise for content creation and telling stories.   At the end of it all, though, humans are the ultimate storytellers, and that bodes well for our future.