AI Documentary Filmmaking: Real Stories, Synthetic Images

Documentary filmmaking is finding unexpected applications for generative AI. Historical reconstruction — visualizing events for which no footage exists — is the most immediately obvious use: AI can now produce period-accurate imagery for almost any historical moment. But the more conceptually interesting applications are elsewhere: visualizing interior experience (anxiety, grief, memory), creating visual metaphors for abstract subjects (climate systems, economic forces, neural processes), and building immersive environments for interview subjects to inhabit. The critical questions around AI documentary are real and unresolved: what is the ethical obligation to disclose AI-generated imagery, how does AI image generation interact with the truth-claim of documentary, and when does visualization become fabrication? The competitions that include documentary categories (including the Runway AI Film Festival and WSXA) are the spaces where these questions are being argued through practice. The filmmakers navigating this ethically and aesthetically are producing some of the most interesting work in contemporary non-fiction.

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