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v1 - April 2026. This preface is a working draft, shared as part of building in the open. A revised version lands later this summer, and the final text publishes with the book in 2027.
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"It's never been easier to create footage. But it's never been harder to make a film."
- Derrick Schultz, artist lecture, AI Greenhouse program
Derrick Schultz said this at his artist lecture as part of the AI Greenhouse program last fall and it's been sitting with me since. The barrier to producing (moving) images, text, and sounds has collapsed. The work of making something that means anything, that holds together, that you're willing to put your name to, that knows what it wants to say and why: that has gotten stranger and harder, not easier.
This book comes out of a year of conversations. With students asking what they're allowed to use and what counts as their own work. With teachers trying to keep up with tools that change every few months, wondering what's worth teaching at all. With artists pulling in different directions: some embracing AI with open arms, others refusing on principle, most somewhere in the middle, working things out as they go. None of these people are wrong, exactly. They're all responding to something real.
Every tool we use changes how we think. A pencil is not a typewriter is not a camera is not a screen. So when we ask what AI is doing to filmmaking, or to art education, or to how young people learn to see the world, the honest answer is that we don't fully know yet, and we won't for a while. But it's doing something. It's already doing something.
This book is for people trying to teach and learn creative practice in that gap and holding a space for noticing what it's doing, together.
The shape of what's happened is bigger than "AI arrived in filmmaking." Production has collapsed in cost and effort. An image can be spawned in seconds from a few words. A voice, a style, a world. Tools that did not exist three years ago now exist and change every few months. Tools that do exist are opaque even to the people who build them. The legal, ecological, and labor conditions underneath those tools range from unclear to actively bad. And the field keeps calling all of it "AI" as if that were one thing, when really it's a bundle of both settled and emerging technological capabilities shifting how we make, how we see, how we pay attention, and how we teach.
In October 2025, OpenAI launched its first big ChatGPT brand campaign, a series of cinematic 30-second films carefully crafted by a large team of creatives and shot on 35mm film, just hours after launching Sora 2 (their video AI). The companies selling AI as the inevitable future of creative work benefit from us believing that story but their own ChatGPT campaign suggests they don't fully believe it themselves.
And what worries us about all of this is rarely the technology in isolation. It's the values that produced it, the agenda it continues to push, the power structures that benefit from its rapid spread, and how all of those shape what the technology becomes.
What we've noticed, working with students and teachers this past year, is that each of these shifts is its own live question. Can you still call yourself the author of an image you prompted into existence? What counts as your work when a model trained on millions of other people's work does the heavy lifting? What are you doing to the planet when you generate a minute of video, and does it matter, compared to what? Can you trust what you see on a screen, and should you? How do you teach craft to people who may be persuaded to bypass some of the learning curve, and what parts of the creative process are worth outsourcing or struggling for?
None of these questions resolve cleanly. They resolve differently depending on who's asking, what they're making, and what they care about. Our approach has been to stop pretending otherwise.