Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill. Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com.
It was a dreary Tuesday evening when I descended into the cinema room below London’s five-star May Fair Hotel. Awaiting me was a screening of the most celebrated short films among a growing community of content creators: self-anointed “AI filmmakers.” These were the winners of the Chroma Awards, an artificial intelligence short film event run by ElevenLabs, the AI audio company recently valued at $11B.
Watching AI content on a big screen was a new experience. Smartphones are very much the domain of AI videos, so I was interested to see how these machine-generated creations would stand up to the scrutiny of the theater setting — and whether the quality of storytelling made any of the entries compelling.
I’m no critic, but my lasting impression of the Chroma Awards was this: AI filmmaking is not even close to being a cinema experience. At least not yet.
Some entries were the kind of supercharged slop that would make even the most open-minded viewer barf. My personal sickbag was summoned for The Spooky Speedway, a mind-melting Wacky Races-inspired assault on the senses, featuring a caustic ginger cat. But I will say this for Spooky Speedway: at least it made me feel something.
Many entries left me cold, or shared uncanny qualities that meant they bled into one another. It’s now well established that AI is unable to capture the nuance of human speech, it renders characters inconsistently, and there is a flattened quality to visuals, but these limitations were unforgivingly exposed on a big screen. I guess that’s why we call it slop.
There were exceptions. The Twin Earth, from Jaio Studios, lingered in the memory with its stylistic animation about the discovery of another, happier Earth. Mark Wachholz’s The Cinema That Never Was, which we have previously mentioned in Rendering, also stood out. The short’s dreamy black-and-white sequences, as well as its absence of character dialogue, sanded down AI’s rough edges.
Ultimately, the Chroma Awards entries shared two things in common: Firstly, they revealed that the technology is not yet mature enough for ambitious ideas. Secondly, the storytelling skills of these AI creators could not disguise the fact that their films are artificial. But there is optimism in the community that both these hurdles can be cleared.
Within days of the Chroma Awards, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance unleashed Seedance 2.0 on the internet. It was quickly hailed by AI enthusiasts as a game-changer and sent panic through Hollywood. Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, and Paramount fired off legal threats after seeing Seedance’s vibrant recreations of their IP. If you speak to AI creators, they will tell you that a generative video that looks good today can turn to trash tomorrow. Seedance 2.0 was evidence of this leap forward.
There is also a feeling that the storytellers will come. As Deadpool writer Rhett Reese put it, what happens when a director of Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste decides to pick up a powerful AI model rather than a camera? Hollywood won’t be “cooked” as preposterous AI bros like to brag, but it could be infused with a new way of telling visionary stories. And one day, those stories might even stand up to the scrutiny of a cinema screen.