The questions posed by AI-driven storytelling

If every cultural revolution begins with a new language, ours might well be algorithmic: it is already reshaping how stories are told, by whom, and even what we call creative. As early as the late 1920s, cinema had begun to imagine artificial intelligence on the big screen, and a century later we are now witnessing a wave of AI-generated films, synthetic actors in digital shorts, and soundtracks that compose themselves from a simple narrative prompt. Some of it is fascinating, engaging, immersive even, whilst other applications remain clunky and have little impact. But taken together, this insurgency points to a profound shift underway: creativity is no longer defined by a single author or tool; it is emerging as its own system.

AI isn’t just emulating style or automating tasks. These machines are beginning to have stage presence in the act of storytelling, not just as tools, but rather as collaborators, shaping the structure, suggesting the tone and even asking questions the human creator may have overlooked. Creative workflows that are becoming hybrid by design, where AI-assisting creators can help preserve artistic integrity: a human writes the skeleton of a script, a model expands it, and another person curates or feeds back into what emerges.

The process isn’t linear; it’s layered and symbiotic, like improvisation between two minds that see things differently, and carries real implications for the future of culture and in how entertainment is made, valued, consumed and understood. These tools are enabling further collaboration and in some cases are collaborators themselves. This shift poses some important questions, not just “What will the future of entertainment and media look like?” but “What do we want creative culture to be, when its boundaries are elastic and its authors multiply?”. When a story is partly written by an algorithm, does it change the value we assign to it? Or do we simply revisit our definition of authorship, as we once did when editing became digital and when streaming emerged to rival traditional cinema?

It’s tempting to see AI in creativity as yet another platform shift - reinventing the wheel to speed up tasks, optimise workflows and reduce costs to drive bigger bottom lines. But perhaps its real potential lies in how it invites us to design new ones; new modes of making, new forms of collaboration, new rituals of invention. And just as the industrial age brought a new class of creators - chief among them, photographers, broadcasters, filmmakers - this next wave may usher in a new cohort of creative engineers: individuals who combine technical fluency with aesthetic sensibility, able to shape the systems that in turn shape the work. We may need a new vocabulary entirely to categorise what these people do and a new cultural literacy to engage with the work they produce. However, irrespective of how advanced AI-driven filmmaking becomes, creativity is and will always be guided by storytellers with a vision. 

This shift is not confined to any one demographic. While younger audiences may be more intuitive with generative tools as a creative class raised on social media, the cultural significance of AI-native creativity stretches far beyond just Gen Z, instead belonging to anyone open to collaboration and willing to let go of outdated binaries between human and machine, artist and engineer, creator and coder.

None of this is hypothetical. All over the world, we are witnessing experiments that bring AI into creative practice: not only in the labs of big players, but also in small studios, independent festivals, hackathons, and open challenges like our Reply AI Film Festival. These are places where experimentation is not just allowed but encouraged, and where it becomes clear that we are at the beginning of a profound transformation. The question is no longer whether AI can enter creativity, but how we want creativity itself to change through AI.

That is why, in the face of this wave, the role of the human remains central. AI cannot generate relevance or emotion on its own: it is human context, memory and judgment that transform technology into language, that give it a voice. Humans are not replaced but amplified: precise editors, sharp critics, creative conscience. In the end, as with every story, it is not the tool that determines what truly matters, but the audience: the emotion that lingers, the voice that resonates, the ability to speak in a way no one else can. 

Filippo Rizzante is CTO of Reply