Creating images from verbal or textual prompts has long been done by artists, especially by the police when witnesses describe the physical characteristics of the people they saw committing a crime. Now, AI has turned into a business in short films, for now. This is for the moment the latest in a series of technological changes in the creative industries that began with the synthesizer which replaced many instruments. Orchestras of film music directors in India became obsolete. However, some creative pursuits have not just survived but flourished.
An advertising film maker showed me two short ‘AI films’ he has made, one set in Le Ladak and another in Varanasi. He has not ever been to either place.
Everything about the film was made by AI. Or rather with human-AI interaction. The story and screenplay is, as yet, a product of human imagination but the ‘characters’ who ‘act’, the composition of the shots, the cinematography, the colours, the locale everything is a product of human-AI interaction. Prompting, is the word, by now very commonly used even in LLM (large language modelling) and agentic AI. The characters look so real you would not know that an AI agent is behind it, unless someone informed you.
Real because imperfect!
The most interesting and revealing observation that the film maker made was that AI-generated images are perfect without any blemishes; perfect skin tone, skin colour, no wrinkles, etc. In order to make them look real, he had to add ‘imperfections’ because no one and nothing in real life is perfect. Interestingly, this is a clue to separating deep fakes from the real!
The addition of imperfections is a product of human understanding in the twin sense of human understanding and a human’s understanding. This is important to grasp because the ‘imperfections’ are seen from a specific individual’s point of view, which is what will differentiate one AI film from another.
Creation of images from textual prompts is technology’s way of incorporating what artists, especially those used by the police, do when they seek to portray as close a picture of the offender as is possible based on textual or verbal inputs from a witness. Again similar to such artists’ work, creating multiple portrayals, an AI film also generates mana human figures before a choice is made.
What lies ahead
It is all going to come down to economics, a matter of cost. It is likely that more and more short films will be made with AI, simply because it makes business sense. Theoretically, there is no bar on a long film being made by AI, the only qualification being audience tastes and the practicality of time and cost in such a film being made. Experience will teach us what is a realistic option.
After all, a great deal of film music is a product of one or at best two ‘musical’ instruments capable of producing sounds of different real and natural musical instruments. The days of each film music director with his own team of orchestra are long gone. Imagine the number of people rendered jobless and useless. Legend has it that once the late Asha Bhonsle sang a song for AR Rehman. She thought that it was a rehearsal because she was alone; there was no orchestra. And when she asked him when will the real recording was schedule for, Rehman is believed to have told her that it was already final. He just had to ‘mix’ her singing with musical instruments, which he would do on his own!
Live musical events
The shift to digital music made no dent on live music events at all. According to Custom Market Insights, the global music event market was valued at USD 164 Bn in 2024, and is projected to reach USD 389 Bn by 2033, growing at a 9.5% CAGR. Europe holds the largest share, while Asia-Pacific grows fastest.
We know of the phenomenal success of Taylor Swift’s events in the US and elsewhere. The New York Times noted in 2024 how in 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. Prior to Swift, Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour was the highest grossing at $939 million, stretching from September 2018 to July 2023 and covered more than 300 shows.
Live music streaming is growing too. According to Custom Market Insights, the global live music streaming market will grow from an estimated USD 107 Bn in 2025 to reach USD 726 Bn by 2034, growing at a 23.2% CAGR. North America holds the largest share, while Asia-Pacific grows fastest.
Live music performance is close, just as is a great sporting event, to a genuinely religious or spiritual experience when great artists or sportspersons produce performances that takes us to a different world not commonly experienced. Or live theatre or any great live performance. It does seem that AI-generated performances will not unseat the place of live performances from human lives. In fact, such events may grow as people begin to yearn for a real, non-technological experience.
