October 3, 2025

Cinema After Cinema, The Last Film We Will Ever Make: Where creation becomes simulation and authorship evolves into new forms of possibility

Cinema has always been a paradox, suspended between industry and intimacy. It is a machinery of colossal scale, yet capable of delivering the smallest tremor of human vulnerability. What we now confront, however, is not simply another technological shift within its history, sound, color, digital editing, CGI, but a rupture of its very ontology. Artificial Intelligence promises the possibility of films generated by prompt alone, bypassing the labor of directors, writers, actors, and technicians. The spectacle of cinema becomes, in this horizon, an automated synthesis, a product of computation rather than creation. The promise is intoxicating: limitless stories, infinite variations, films tailored to personal taste at negligible cost. Yet with this promise comes a disquieting erosion. If any narrative can be summoned instantly, indistinguishable from human craft, what becomes of cinema’s claim to be an art of presence? What happens to the aura of performance, the trace of human decision, the vulnerability inscribed in every imperfect gesture? The question is not only what we will watch, but whether what we watch will still be cinema at all.

The New Illusion (and Revelation) of Democratization: Everyone a Filmmaker, at Last

The idea that anyone today can create a film with a few typed commands is both dizzying and profoundly of its time. AI in cinema doesn’t just represent another technical upgrade, after sound, color, digital editing, but a true shift in paradigm, a threshold. Suddenly, the barrier between viewer and creator dissolves. No crews, no expensive equipment, no years of study. Just a vision, or perhaps even just an intuition, translated into language, returned as image.
What for some feels like a threat, for others is an unprecedented form of liberation.

Because it’s true, art has always been about access, but also about tools. And today, across every field, from music to exhibitions, photography to writing, what matters most is no longer execution, but vision. The conceptual skeleton behind form. The ability to think, rather than merely perform. In this light, algorithmic filmmaking emerges as the natural outcome of a long, slow dematerialization of authorship, one that began long ago with Photoshop plugins, presets, filters, generative apps, and assistive tools.
Even the highest forms of art are now structured by a digital grammar.

Here, democratization takes on a dual face. On one hand, it’s clear that generating an image doesn’t equal generating meaning. The danger is an aesthetics of instantaneity, where creation becomes pure output, lacking the friction, the depth, the failure that shapes authentic artistic gestures. But on the other hand, we must also recognize that this radical accessibility has opened the door to new sensitivities, previously excluded subjectivities, and narratives once impossible under old hierarchical systems.

The filmmaker doesn’t disappear, he evolves. No longer a solitary demiurge, but an orchestrator of possibilities, a designer of vision, an editor of dreams. And the user, once a passive spectator, steps into the act of creation. In many cases, the user is the new auteur, someone who may not know how to shoot, but knows how to recognize, select, compose, and direct.
In this transition, the romantic figure of the auteur doesn’t dissolve, it multiplies.

And perhaps, yes, in a world where everything can be generated, true value will relocate elsewhere, in the idea, in the act of choosing, in slowness, in the inner urgency that drives creation. The risk is a desert of images. But it’s also an invitation to a new kind of fertility.
Not cinema without cinema, but a cinema that finally understands the most important gesture may no longer be holding the camera, but knowing what is still worth seeing.

Economy of Substitution: An Industry in Flux

Cinema has never been a purely artistic endeavor. From its inception, it has also been an industry, a complex system of labor, contracts, unions, distribution networks, and financial risk. Making a film has always meant mobilizing capital alongside imagination. Yet, in the era of AI-generated cinema, that balance begins to shift. What is presented as efficiency is, in truth, and perhaps inevitably, a logic of substitution.

The cost of traditional filmmaking is immense. Studios allocate millions to actors, crews, locations, set design, and months of post-production. AI promises to streamline and accelerate much of this process. For investors and corporations, the appeal is obvious: why employ hundreds when a small team of operators can do the job of many?
But are we sure the equation is that simple?

This “substitution” carries consequences far beyond economics. The cultural ecosystem that once relied on collaboration and specialization risks collapsing into a single axis: the algorithm. What evolves is not only the role of individual skill sets, but the collective texture of cinema itself. A film is not merely a sum of shots, it is the condensation of negotiations, mistakes, improvisations. AI doesn’t negotiate. It calculates.

And yet, this shift may also offer a counterbalance to long-standing inequalities. Major studios, already dominant, will no longer be the only ones to harness these tools and expand their reach. Independent filmmakers, historically marginalized but still able to carve out space through ingenuity and intimacy, may now, thanks to this epochal shift, overcome many technical complications, streamline their workflow, and achieve results that rival those of major studios.
If AI-driven production becomes the norm, the traditional categories of “independent” and “studio” might begin to dissolve, much like the blurred lines we now see between celebrity, influencer, and content creator. What remains is scale, an economy dictated by creative and computational force, rather than institutional labels.

What emerges is not the collapse of an industry, but its gradual and perhaps inevitable transformation. For over a century, cinema has been both art and labor, expression and employment. To replace the latter with automation risks impoverishing the former.
And so, the question remains: in the race toward efficiency, what kind of cinema will survive, and at what human cost?

Accelerated Aesthetics: Toward a New Visual Alphabet

As the film industry undergoes a structural transformation, the language of images is also evolving, propelled by the logic of automation. Artificial intelligence does not create like a human being, it does not hesitate, doubt, or stumble. Yet it is precisely within this gap that a new creative territory begins to unfold. AI generates with speed and precision, producing images that are crisp, coherent, hyper-defined. And in doing so, a new aesthetic is emerging, a visual grammar that mirrors our time: immediate, dense, and unmistakably legible.

Perfect faces, balanced compositions, amplified landscapes. Everything appears designed to capture the contemporary gaze, increasingly trained to navigate excess. Machine-generated films speak the language of the feed, the fragment, the instant. But that doesn’t make them superficial, it makes them different.
In fact, paradoxically, it’s precisely this immediacy that restores centrality to the artistic choice.
Despite automation, it is still the human who decides what to show, where to intervene, which forms to embrace, and which deviations to welcome. The human eye detects inconsistencies, distortions, and the strange artifacts hidden between pixels. And it is precisely in that threshold, between order and error, that a new creative field begins to emerge.

This evolving aesthetic has the potential to reinvent how we tell stories. Where traditional cinema required slowness and immersion, we can now explore more synthetic, sensory, and fluid forms of narration. The rhythm changes, and with it, the space in which meaning arises. Urgency doesn’t necessarily erase depth, it can instead create new forms of intensity. Meanings that don’t develop over time, but erupt in the shock of the moment.

Even the dissolution of technical limits can be fertile. The absence of constraint demands a new kind of discipline, not a choice between what can or cannot be done, but between infinite possibilities. Creativity shifts, from technical execution to curatorial thought, from the hand to the gaze, from scarcity to intention.

What is emerging is not a lesser form of cinema, but an accelerated one. A cinema where perfection is not meant to erase error, but to compose a new syntax. A frictionless cinema can still hold depth, if the gaze that directs it knows where to settle.
The challenge today is to remember that even in immediacy, a form of truth can emerge, and that the clarity of AI, when filtered through poetic intent, may paradoxically make art more art, and less technique.

The Metamorphosis of Authorship: Art Beyond the Artist

At the heart of cinema there has always been a fundamental question: who is the author? Whether embodied in the singular vision of the auteur or distributed across the collective work of a crew, film has always carried the trace of intention. Even in the most commercial blockbusters, human choices could be felt: how to frame a scene, how to direct an actor, where to cut.
With the rise of AI, this bond between creation and creator does not disappear, it transforms.

To speak of “authorship” in an AI-generated film is to redefine the very concept. Who, today, is the artist in a process where a prompt becomes a screenplay, a dataset becomes interpretation, and an algorithm determines rhythm, gesture, and tone? Is it the programmer, the user, the machine, or simply the one who makes decisions along the way? Or perhaps all of them together, in a new form of distributed co-authorship?
This new configuration does not erase responsibility, it redistributes it. Cinema, once anchored in the signature, now opens to a more fluid dimension, where the signature lies in the process rather than in the hand.

We do not believe this is a crisis, but rather, as in every epoch, a threshold. If, as many claim, art is the expression of human interiority, then perhaps today that interiority expands, externalizes, and reflects itself within new structures. And even if a film generated by a model does not “feel” emotion, it can still generate it, just as synthetic voices or deepfake images already do. Emotion in the viewer is not proof of the author, but proof of the power of language.
We find ourselves in a fertile paradox: the effect of art persists, even as its technique dematerializes.

The risk is not that the machine replaces the human, we do not believe that is possible in cinema, at least not now, but that we lose awareness of the human role within the machine. For it is still people who decide which tools to use, which data to train, which trajectories to activate. The director may become a curator, the playwright a suggester of themes, the actor a body distributed across data. But these are not diminutions, they are metamorphoses.

In this scenario, authorship does not vanish, it reconfigures. It becomes a practice of orientation, a choice among near-infinite possibilities. The aura of cinema does not dissolve, it hides in new forms. No longer in the singular and unrepeatable gesture, but in the coherence of thought that flows even through algorithmic generation.

This transformation also opens the door to a new kind of trust. Audiences, who have long suspended disbelief in order to be carried by narrative, may perhaps learn to recognize the intelligence behind automation. Or will we remain bound to the same old narrative of “handmade labor,” the myth of long manual effort as the only guarantee of authenticity? If, in the future, an “organic cinema” certified as entirely human should emerge, it will be by choice, not by fear. Hybridization, we believe, cannot be the end of art, at most, it is its next chapter.

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Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.

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Fakewhale Log is the media layer of Fakewhale. It explores how new technologies are reshaping artistic practices and cultural narratives, combining curated insights, critical reviews, and direct dialogue with leading voices.

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