Toronto film critic: generative AI in filmmaking is "fundamentally antithetical" to art itself

CapCut, the video editing platform, hosted an event called CRE[AI]TE: New Voices in AI Filmmaking at this year's Toronto International Film Festival Market, showcasing submissions made using its Video Studio. The move has drawn sharp criticism from film critics and artists who argue that generative AI has no place in cinema.

Suad Alad, a film writer and critic with Toronto-based publication 1st on Film, said the decision feels like a betrayal of TIFF's stated mission. "It just seems completely antithetical to why I believe TIFF exists," Alad said. "But what I really couldn't wrap my head around was why CapCut, of all platforms, would be the company to support its use within their app." CapCut was built as affordable editing software for aspiring creators who couldn't afford industry-standard tools like Adobe Premiere or After Effects. "It was an app fans would use to create edits of their favourite television shows, movies, and the people who starred in them. And what made it all the more meaningful was that it was all done completely by the person uploading these videos."

Alad argues that generative AI in filmmaking doesn't encourage creative innovation—it replicates what already exists. "Everything generative AI creates is modelled on work that already exists. Nothing is conjured up through a mix of inspiration and personal experience. And none of this is done with any credit to the artists it is 'learning' off of," Alad explained. She points out that the struggle involved in making art is half the point. The ability to experience a process from start to finish, to possibly fail, has become a lost art among those embracing AI tools.

"There is nothing about the arts that relies on the existence of natural born talent," Alad said. "One does not wake up, having never written creatively or captured anything on film in their lives, and ends up making something on par with the works of Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf, or Agnès Varda or Wong Kar-Wai." The process—the years of study, the failures, the refinement—is inseparable from the work.

Some high-profile directors, including Martin Scorsese, Darren Aronofsky and Steven Soderbergh, have come out in support of integrating AI into their movies to streamline storyboard development, pre-production and visual effects. But Alad's position reflects a growing concern that AI-generated content represents a fundamental departure from what filmmaking has always required: human choice, struggle and vision.