{"id":209261,"date":"2025-10-08T14:19:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T14:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/209261\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T14:19:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T14:19:08","slug":"ai-is-here-to-stay-and-change-things-mad-max-director-george-miller-on-why-he-is-taking-part-in-an-ai-film-festival-george-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/209261\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018AI is here to stay and change things\u2019: Mad Max director George Miller on why he is taking part in an AI film festival | George Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no arguing the use of artificial intelligence in film-making is getting a bad rap. Last week\u2019s unveiling of Hollywood\u2019s first AI \u201cactress\u201d, Tilly Norwood,<\/a> generated howls of protest from actors\u2019 unions across the UK and US, where the industry is still reeling from last year\u2019s 118-day strike<\/a> over, among other issues, the threat of AI.<\/p>\n

And earlier this week, Australia\u2019s Productivity Commission was pilloried by Liberals and Greens <\/a>alike for failing to recognise the dire impact AI may have on the country\u2019s creative industries.<\/p>\n

In May, during heated discussions at the Cannes film festival, the industry was warned it was on a slippery slope, with AI threatening jobs, copyright protections and the integrity of the creative process.<\/p>\n

But the film industry is far from united against AI; not everyone believes its rapid advance is eroding the very essence of human storytelling. \u201cThe wave is coming and it\u2019s impossible to stop it,\u201d one producer told a Cannes roundtable<\/a>. \u201cOur only option is to surf on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, one of Australia\u2019s most decorated film-makers is getting on his board: acclaimed Mad Max director and producer George Miller<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is arguably the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image,\u201d Miller tells the Guardian. \u201cAs a film-maker, I\u2019ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller is about to lead the judging panel at the Omni 1.0 AI film festival<\/a>, Australia\u2019s first fully fledged award festival for wholly AI-generated films. He joined the jury out of \u201cintense curiosity\u201d about the evolving role of AI in storytelling \u2013 and his interest goes beyond the technology. AI, he believes, is part of a deeper philosophical shift in our understanding of creative authorship.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that\u2019s what the debate and the anxiety is about,\u201d he says. \u201cIt strikes me how this debate echoes earlier moments in art history.\u201d<\/p>\n

He likens our current moment to the Renaissance, when the introduction of oil paint \u201cgave artists the freedom to revise and enhance their work over time\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat shift sparked controversy \u2013 some argued that true artists should be able to commit to the canvas without corrections, others embraced the new flexibility,\u201d Miller says. \u201cA similar debate unfolded in the mid-19th century with the arrival of photography. Art has to evolve. And while photography became its own form, painting continued. Both changed, but both endured. Art changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Omni AI film festival\u2019s founders, Aryeh Sternberg and Travis Rice, are pitching November\u2019s event as a bold bid to cement Australia\u2019s reputation as a global hub for AI-generated cinema; a meeting point for film-makers, technologists and creatives to explore how storytelling evolves when human imagination intersects with machine learning \u2013 and to thrash out the ethical dilemmas that come with it.<\/p>\n

Each submission will be rigorously screened for plagiarism and assessed under strict ethical guidelines, ensuring that technological innovation is matched by artistic integrity.<\/p>\n

Such is the rate of acceleration in the technology\u2019s capabilities, Rice says the quality of the hundreds of entries submitted to Omni 1.0 has increased dramatically since he and Sternberg staged Omni 0.5, a dress rehearsal of sorts, back in April.<\/p>\n

The benchmark for selection? \u201cWhether a film could plausibly be screened on mainstream platforms like Netflix or HBO,\u201d Rice says.<\/p>\n

\"HighlightHighlight reel from the OMNI international AI film festival held in April 2025 \u2013 video<\/p>\n

As a judge, Miller says he will be watching out for what the industry has come to refer to as \u201cAI slop\u201d. Emotional resonance \u2013 not technical novelty \u2013 is the true measure of any film\u2019s worth, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome films you forget the moment you get to the car park. Others stay with you the rest of your life and they become part of the way you perceive the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

While critics often argue that machine-made cinema will be emotionally hollow or formulaic, Rice \u2013 a curator working at the intersection of art, film and technology \u2013 believes that critique can be equally applied to what is currently being made by humans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat [idea of a] human \u2018special something\u2019 is compelling, but I also think that there is a ton of already hollow, very vapid, very empty content on any of the channels that we watch,\u201d Rice says. \u201cWe\u2019re committed to showcasing compelling narratives, not just flashy tech demos or viral clips or a silly throwaway meme.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Miller believes AI is unlikely to ever be capable of fully replicating the collaborative qualities of human performance, he sees its accessibility as a gamechanger.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will make screen storytelling available to anyone who has a calling to it,\u201d he says. \u201cI know kids not yet in their teens using AI. They don\u2019t have to raise money. They\u2019re making films \u2013 or at least putting footage together. It\u2019s way more egalitarian.\u201d<\/p>\n

And democratic, Rice argues: AI can give voice to creators in regions where they may otherwise be silenced by governments or targeted while filming, as has been witnessed recently in Iran in the cases of director Mohammad Rasoulof<\/a> and film-makers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Among the submissions Omni 1.0 has received, for instance, is one from Malaysia about police corruption there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis particular story \u2026 would be very dangerous to make in Malaysia [without AI],\u201d Rice says.<\/p>\n

As for the threat AI poses to human employment, Miller takes a Darwinian view: \u201cThe first film I made, Mad Max, had 30 people on the credits. The last film I made [Furiosa] had over 1,000 people credited, and a huge number of those were CGI visual effects artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recalls a recent conversation he had with a group of fellow film-makers, one of whom had just seen the 2015 British documentary Listen to Me Marlon<\/a>. The documentary makers had used what was, in 2015, cutting edge software to create a 3D rendering of Marlon Brando reciting Macbeth.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the future, anybody who wants to pay the rights for it can have Marlon Brando in their movie,\u201d this film-maker had enthused to Miller. But another director \u2013 \u201cyounger and wiser than most of us\u201d, Miller recalls \u2013 disagreed.<\/p>\n

\u201c[They] replied yes, you\u2019ll have a character who looks like Marlon Brando, but you\u2019ll have nothing close to Marlon Brando. You won\u2019t have the engagement, that performances arise out of the collaborative effort between other actors and directors and writers and so on. You will not have the essence of Brando.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that applies to everything \u2013 whether it\u2019s a song, a novel, or whatever.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou won\u2019t have that human essence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s no arguing the use of artificial intelligence in film-making is getting a bad rap. Last week\u2019s unveiling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-209261","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}