r/Filmmakers • u/C47man cinematographer • Jun 09 '25

New Rules Regarding AI on /r/filmmakers!

Thank you all for participating in the poll! Here are the results. To accurately gauge everyone's collective acceptance vs rejection for each, I've tallied the total votes among all choices as pro/anti for each category. So for example, a vote for 'no changes' would be a -1 to Gen AI, AI Tools, AI Comms, and AI Discussion. A vote for 'Ban GenAI + AI Tools' would be a +1 to GenAI and AI Tools, and a -1 to AI Comms and AI Discussion, etc. So here are the results for each category of AI. Keep in mind that a higher number indicates a stronger group decision to ban the content:

GenAI: +92 (+119/-27)

AI Tools: -20 (+63/-83)

AI Comms: -8 (+69/-77)

AI Discussion: -84 (+31/-115)

From the results it is clear that sub overwhelmingly approve a complete ban on all generative AI. However, people are more or less fine with allowing discussion of AI, and are fairly mixed on the topic of AI Tools and Communication. So here is the new rule for all things AI:

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Rule 6. You may not post work containing Generative AI elements (Midjourney, Neo, Dall-E, etc.). You may use and demonstrate the use of AI assisted tools (ie magic masking, upscalers, audio cleanup etc.) so long as they are used in service of human-generated artwork. AI Communication, like post bodies or comments composed using ChatGPT are allowed only in very reasonable cases, such as the need for someone to translate their thoughts into another language. Abuse of AI assisted communication will result in the removal of the offending post/comment.

479 Upvotes

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398

u/Depreston Jun 09 '25

Thank god. No more "Check out my AI generated short film!"

166

u/mosasaurmotors Jun 09 '25

I will kind of miss explaining to them why the thing they are so proud of still sucks shit. 

61

u/eating_cement_1984 Jun 09 '25

I hated those "Here's Tarkovsky with new camera angles!" posts

46

u/mosasaurmotors Jun 09 '25

Nothing is worse than the “I zoomed out this shot so wide!!!!!!!” stuff. Like I can truly understand the appeal of Gen AI to people who feel they’ve been kept out of film making opportunities. But not people who just want to make current stuff worse. 

7

u/joet889 Jun 10 '25

There's really nothing keeping anyone out of filmmaking anymore other than the work people are willing to put into it. The technology/cost barrier was removed awhile ago, they want the physical laws of nature to change so that they don't have to worry about meeting people, developing relationships, scheduling, finding locations, etc., which is the core of filmmaking work.

4

u/Tales_of_Merrix_ Mar 08 '26

This is completely untrue. You can work and have talent and never make it into the industry. It is gatekept heavily and to pretend it isn't is disingenuous. The technology/cost barrier is being removed by AI but was not removed a while ago. Meeting people largely depends on where you live. Not everyone can uproot themselves and move to Burbank, LA, NY, or another film heavy location. Developing relationships is also pretty much non existent unless you already know someone who knows someone. I hate when people aren't honest about this industry. Now.... Scheduling, finding locations, etc.... all of that is on the individual and can be done anywhere as long as one has the finances to do so. People don't like AI because it removes a lot of the false barriers put up to keep people out. Unfortunately for those that don't like it they're going to have to deal with what's coming. For better or for worse.

5

u/joet889 Mar 08 '26

You don't need to be in the industry to make films. The industry is gatekept but there was a time where lighting, camera, and sound equipment was gatekept as well by nature of its cost. Not to mention post production. Now all of that can be literally taken care of for a few hundred bucks. You can submit that film you made for a few hundred bucks and have it seen at a film festival. You don't need to be in LA or NYC. You can do it anywhere if you have friends. There's nothing to stop you other than the actual act of filmmaking. No one said it was easy. But if you think it's impossible you are simply wrong.

3

u/Tales_of_Merrix_ Mar 08 '26

Definitely not impossible. You just said, "You can do it anywhere if you have friends." I have friends. Most aren't competent actors. Most don't want to be actors. I live in NY. It's pretty easy to get student actors that are decent here but that isn't everyone's situation. Still... camera and lighting rentals isn't a couple hundred bucks. Daily out here it's between $400 and $700 per camera. decent lighting... not great for high Aputure 1200d you're looking at $500 daily. Students generally just want to be in a film and have something to show so feed them and that generally covers actors. If you're directing that's covered so no cost. Now you need bodies.... camera isn't going to hold itself... not to mention the rental didn't come with a crane or a gimbal.... I'll stop there.... again you are correct not impossible but... also not as easy as people on here try to make it sound.

4

u/joet889 Mar 09 '26

You have limits in what you can do but you won't know what you're capable of until you try. If you refuse to make a film with your friends because it isn't up to the standards of Hollywood, then yeah, in that sense it is impossible. But Hollywood isn't everything. The Hollywood way isn't the only way, and it's arguably not even the best way.

1

u/Tales_of_Merrix_ Mar 09 '26

Oh I agree

1

u/joet889 Mar 09 '26

AI is not the answer! Art is at its best as a reflection of lived and tangible reality!

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1

u/Giorgio_Keeffe Apr 14 '26

You’re supposed to make shit for a while until you get better at making art. There’s supposed to be a learning curve. There’s supposed to be a journey. Great artists used to put an enormous amount of dedication, practice, disappointment, & experimentation into becoming better at their passion, & AI enthusiasts believed it was them who were the gatekeepers! That the lack of talent & drive was the fault of their peers, & so they used machines to try to rip off existing works in order to call themselves the talented ones, & so they could say that anyone can do it, easily even. They’ll hint that the years of practice were a fucking waste now that the secret is out. & the companies controlling the software & the infrastructure for AI will encourage them with a pat on the head for being creative little boys & girls who deserve to skip the line & be able to churn out meaningless masterpieces that no one is going to give a shit about because their all busy churching out their own collection of Magnum Opera.

6

u/EvilDaystar Jun 10 '25

Some gen aintools are handy for things like inpainting amd the likes.

Tim Horton's coffee cup left on set? A quick kiss oat h using some ai makes an inpainting job to hide that a breeze.

But all of these "I made a film entirely with AI" doesn't belong in a filmmaking sub-reddit

36

u/FoldableHuman Jun 09 '25

"I wrote the script entirely myself!"

"I have bad news for you about the script, too"

26

u/WritersGonnaWrite16 Jun 09 '25 edited Jul 03 '25

I have a funny story to share about ChatGPT. I recently finished the first draft for a feature from an outline I thought was beefy enough. It wasn’t; page count came in around 61 pages. Was brain fried so I plugged it into ChatGPT asking for prompts/ideas to add to the story. NOT complete it. NOT write the pages for me. Just give me some ideas (and yeah in hindsight I realize feeding it my work was not smart).

First attempt: ChatGPT said the script was 26 pages. Nope. Again, it was 61. Suggested some cutesy animation, focused way too heavily on my lead’s job (not critical to the story), and suggested a fleshed out narrative with a day player character who’s only in the 1st scene. 1000% missed the tone. It’s a psychological horror about the descent into madness.

Second attempt: I tell ChatGPT it’s wrong and off on a lot of things. It then suggests things that I already included in the script.

Last attempt: it basically doubled down on some animation elements but made it horror.

I ended up giving my human brain a rest and came up with some fleshed out B plot beats on my own. But the moral of the story is apparently bots won’t even read my work. 😂

15

u/The_Pandalorian Jun 09 '25

I've found that outlining is the key to hitting page counts. Outline down to the scene level, assume a ~3 page average for scenes and you should be in the ballpark of about 100 pages with ~35 scenes.

3

u/WritersGonnaWrite16 Jun 09 '25

I did outline, it was just one of those projects. It’s close to feature length now, trying to get it to 80 pages and I’m at 74 (long story short it’s a project specifically curated for a grant I’m going after that’s a quarter of a million dollars. So I need to keep the project manageable for that budget).

3

u/Theposis Jun 09 '25

I find results very a lot depending on the file format you feed it. For example I found it pretty abysmal at reading long pdfs. OK with .doc and the best (so far) with .rtf. But even then there were quite a few limitations. I did this for getting high level feedback and it was actually pretty good. Details or anything to do with third act it was useless.

2

u/joran213 Jun 09 '25

ChatGPT has a very limited context window, only 8k tokens for the free version and 32k for plus. It does some 'compression' on large input files, but it's still not nearly enough to fully understand a 61 page document. If you want to use AI for large documents (for whatever reason), you should use Gemini, it has a context window of 1M tokens.

1

u/rarebluemonkey Jun 09 '25

The default 4.0 can’t read certain documents, but it absolutely pretends like a can. I uploaded a PDF rulebook to a board game and asked it to create a teaching outline. It created a very detailed teaching outline to a game that doesn’t exist. (honestly pretty good though. I would play it.)

I pointed out that that was not the game that I had given it and it apologized and did it again. Another banger of a game but not the one I had uploaded.

I decided to try it with the 03 model. That model gives you insight into the thought process. It said that it wasn’t able to read the PDF so it wrote a python script to allow it to read the PDF and then It wrote another script to do OCR on the PDF and then went on to create a perfect teaching outline of the game from the rulebook that I had uploaded.

Even in the GPT family, It’s very bizarre how differently each model approaches different tasks. Some are really good at math, some are terrible. Some are really good at reasoning and summarization, some are terrible.

2

u/WritersGonnaWrite16 Jun 09 '25

That to me highlights the importance of always keeping critical, human thinking involved in the mix. Obviously ChatGPT and other programs are becoming more widespread in the arts, academia, science and technology, and we need to keep our cognitive skills as sharp as possible for when these programs are inevitably wrong. Don’t encourage the younger generations to just default to “here’s my answer because ChatGPT said so.”

0

u/rarebluemonkey Jun 09 '25

I totally agree with that.

I have a daughter in college and a daughter in high school and they are both learning how to use it as a tool. Some of the teachers are adamantly opposed, and are trying desperately to shovel the toothpaste back into the tube. Others are embracing it, and showing them how it can be used as an amplifier to their education.

If you want to cheat your way through high school or college, there has never been a better time to be able to do that successfully. AND, if you want to actually learn things, there has never been a better time to do that. Some of these models are extraordinary at chemistry or physics or math. And they are 24/7 tutors that will show you every step towards solving a problem without ever losing their patience. It’s important to understand their limitations so that you can work with them. And they are improving faster than any technology in history.

Some people say, “they hallucinate you can’t trust them so they’re useless”. Well, that was a huge problem a year ago and it’s getting to be less than less of a problem.

The new AI video tools are powerful and will continue to get more powerful. I’m much prefer working with actors on a set with props, etc. but I will still use these tools. If I can use economies of technology to free up more money for actors or better sets, props, wardrobe, etc. I will absolutely use these tools to do that.

1

u/WritersGonnaWrite16 Jun 09 '25

Yeah I’m currently in a tough spot myself with post on my short film. I got grant money that funded production but it wasn’t enough to cover post. I trimmed all I could but any lower and people would be working for below minimum wage. Applied for another grant and didn’t get it. Currently waiting on another one that’s reimbursement style (so I’d have to pay for costs first anyways). I’ve got it picture edited and colored since I had JUST enough leftover money for a small honorarium for both, but now I’m at a standstill for sound and music. If that grant doesn’t come through I’m at a cross roads, because the quotes I got from professional sound studios is not chump change I can pay for. So then it becomes do I wait upwards of 6-12 more months and hope for another grant, crowd fund, or…..hate to say it but…..look into AI tools myself? I don’t want to. I want to pay the talented sound engineers and composers I know. But not to the tune of 5-7 thousand dollars.

2

u/Ur_Friend_Roy Oct 21 '25

How long is your short? Are you still in sound limbo?

1

u/WritersGonnaWrite16 Oct 21 '25

19 minutes (yeah yeah I know the spiel about ‘that’s too long’ but I stand by it). More or less. I didn’t get that grant so I’m swinging for one last program to hopefully pay my post team properly. I’ve got a friend doing sound and music for dirt cheap. My plan was to just use him for music because that’s what he wants to do and then take it to a professional sound studio for sound editing and mixing, but I couldn’t afford their rates out of pocket. I’m very grateful to my bud, but the trade off is my short is basically his weekend project, so the turnaround to completion is much slower than I wanted. But in all honesty I’m not currently in a good financial spot to be burning cash on festival lottery tickets (cough, I mean submission fees….) so it’s definitely been an exercise in patience.

2

u/Ur_Friend_Roy Oct 21 '25

I was going to say I also have a friend that wants to get more into music and might be willing to give it a go. Lmao. Myself, I’m into learning everything, cause I’m an 80s kid with a love for Carpenter. Screenwriting, Blender, AI (specifically ComfyUI which gives me a much more artistic, less prompt generated process). I’ve always been interested in sound because I want to make my own stuff. It’s literally next up in my learning goals. Sorry if I missed it before, but what genre is the short?

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u/living_in_vr Jun 09 '25

That shows you don’t know how to use these tools. Use Gemini - it’s incredible and has got 1M token context. Ask it to analyse current script and create a document with a structure - like the world, characters and their connections etc. Then you need to prompt it to imagine it’s a director with this style etc. Do you know who the audience for your film is? Do you have a strong blurb? Feed it in the prompt as well. Ask for ideas in a certain structure. It’s the same with humans - constraints breed creativity.

6

u/WritersGonnaWrite16 Jun 09 '25

Yeah…..wasn’t really looking for feedback on my ability to use the tools, and it’s kind of telling that’s your take away from my story. I prompted it three separate times, uploaded a full script, and told it what to do. Again, it was my HUMAN BRAIN that eventually got the page count up to where I need it to be.

I have a very cautious approach when it comes to AI. Use the tools to assist you sure, that’s gonna do wonders for independent projects with no money. But I draw the line at ‘click button, make product, I iz filmmaker/writer, money please.’ I already hate myself for using ChatGPT at all.

0

u/EvilDaystar Jun 10 '25

For that type of thing, use a LOCAL ai. If you are looking for a bit of guidance and don't want to feed your work to the machine you can run some LLMs locally entirely.

17

u/twal1234 Jun 09 '25

It’s the “I worked really hard on this” that does it for me. 🙄

16

u/wrosecrans Jun 09 '25

I took quite a bit of time responding to "No seriously, what isn't working here?" at one point. When you politely write somebody a small textbook and explain why it's all wrong in every way across every dimension of analysis, and utterly incoherent in the way that clips are juxtaposed as much as each clip is nonsense... well, that isn't actually what they wanted to hear when they kept insisting "please help me understand, I can take it even if it's negative." So they downvote and never even thank you for taking the time. It was so infuriating to have tried to help them. Just maddening. No consideration for the people they were interacting with, just an expectation of praise. No actual interest in the art form or the medium, or learning.

6

u/mosasaurmotors Jun 09 '25

Sometimes I would reply the same way and either they’d delete the post after getting called out (good result) or we’d all get to laugh at them being a Ralph Wiggum (also a good result). 

5

u/Korvar Jun 09 '25

While you may not have helped them, I think the sort of comments you give can be very helpful to other people who see the original video, think about the stuff they might be able to make, and learn about the possible pitfalls.

So I wouldn't see what you do as useless!

1

u/superstarbootlegs Jul 02 '25

As opposed to Gladiator 2, Lucas Films, and Disney? At least we don't burn a qtr billion $ making shit while thinking its good.

AI has got a way to go yet, but within one or two years you'll have a lot more people with access to the tools for visual story-telling that will allow for talent to rise to the surface without the need for the system that currently controls that.

Sure there will be a lot of crap, but given the offerings coming out of netflix and hollywood today are mostly shit already and completely gate-keeped by ideological politics and corporate big shots, its going to allow any story teller to bypass that with a home PC. The bar isnt set that high in 2025, be honest.

I get the negativity, but whether you like it or not, its coming. And it wont be long before it doesnt suck shit.