I Went to an AI Film Festival. I Was Skeptical, but the Crowd Loved It

Lincoln Center is one of New York’s great arts hubs. On a sweltering Thursday evening in June, it was filled with tech bros.

The Runway AI festival showed 10 short films, created almost entirely with AI, from the visuals to the voices. The AI video startup has staged the festival for years, but this was its biggest yet. The 10 films were chosen from thousands of entrants and were appraised by a panel of judges from the entertainment and tech industries.

I’ll likely get a slap on the wrist for calling it a “film festival,” as Runway representatives repeatedly told me that they removed “film” from the name to make room for fashion, advertising, and whatever “new media” is. Still, the event amounted to watching 10 short films in the packed Alice Tully Hall and then giving out awards.

Oh, and Ron Howard, director of “The Da Vinci Code” and “Apollo 13,” was there for an introductory discussion.

Did the films’ characters have six fingers or robotic hands? Certainly not. Visually, many of the films were indistinguishable from human-made media. But they suffered from a worse fate: they were boring.

The AI hype parade

The festival started with a press conference, where we peppered two Runway executives with questions about the future of filmmaking.

Co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela was, as expected, confident about AI video and said the year’s films spoke for themselves. He asked us to watch the festival’s films from three years ago. “You will see consistently how far we’ve come,” he said.

“The bar is very high,” Valenzuela said. “The stories themselves are getting so good because the technology is getting so good.”

I asked about the downswing in public perception of AI in the US. Graduates are booing references in their commencement speeches, and more Americans would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a data center. Does AI’s reputation worry him?

Valenzuela quibbled with the premise of my question. He argued that the most vocal critics of a technology are those who use it frequently — and that sentiment polls are biased toward them.

“We think the vast majority of people are very positive or optimistic about the technology, but they’d rather not vocalize it,” he said.

After filing into the auditorium, I heard Ron Howard’s take on AI. He wasn’t as bullish on where the tech is now — “I can’t say that I’ve seen it yet in my world,” he said of AI’s efficiencies — but he told the crowd not to be scared.

“There are already CGI characters, there are already animated characters,” Howard said. “I expect there’s room for all of it.”

I wasn’t sure the crowd needed the advice. Based on who was sitting around me, I’d say there were more engineers than artists in the audience.

Let the videos begin!

“Story is always king,” Howard said. As we settled in for the 10 shorts back-to-back — each under 15 minutes in length — I learned that he was right.

Some of the films were truly joyous. I loved “Where Knights Fall,” a spoof of Rapunzel with a belly-sliding prince. Many others, though, had flimsy or overdone plot lines. Films about cursed children and drug-dealing sheep had predictable endings.

The animated films seemed to perform the best with the crowd. For the films with humans, I found myself looking for problems: Did the words match the lip movements, or did their walking seem natural? There weren’t these obvious errors, I realized, but the AI-generated humans seemed relatively emotionless.

One of the most successful films with humans — or semi-humans, as an influencer tries to figure out whether he’s AI-generated — was “Tairell Isn’t Real.”

Before the festival, the short’s creator, Dave Clark, told me that it was a prologue to a longer feature that would be a “hybrid” of AI and live action.

“I’m showing what this idea could be, with the idea of making it with actors,” Clark said. A non-AI version of this short film “wouldn’t have been made ever,” he said.

The festival’s top placement went to a short named “A Face Only a Mother Could Love.” It was sad and sweet and heartwarming, like a Pixar knockoff.

I’ll admit it: I’m an emotional movie-goer. I’ll chuckle, cry, or exhale an “oh my god” in the theater, sometimes upsetting my neighbor. My test for Runway’s festival was: what kinds of emotions would the shorts stir in me?

The answer turned out to be almost none. I found them a bit trite — not because of the tech, but because of the story.

My seat mate didn’t seem to agree. He laughed out loud throughout several of the shorts, and seemed moved by one of the more emotional ones. Maybe he’s the audience for these films; I’m just not.