The Brew | Why AI Destroys the Real Meaning of Filmmaking

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• 📖 READ this episode by scrolling down past the intro and recommendations.

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Remember when we wanted to make films, not just generate them?

In this latest edition of The Brew, a personal accounting of what I’m struggling with and getting right as an artist in 2026, let’s talk about why AI destroys the process of filmmaking — the very fun of it — by stripping away the friction, chaos, and collaboration that also produces the greatest films.

Call this corporate push to turn bespoke, human art forms into disposable, mass-produced, flat-pack junk the “IKEA-fication” of cinema (and art).

I’ll be using plenty of examples from cinematic history — especially Steven Spielberg’s filmography — to support my case. Stick around for the last third, in which I also dive into “The Pitt”, the “Scrubs” sequel series, and a Booker Prize winner that made me scream.

On the itinerary this week:

• THE PROCESS IS THE POINT: Why AI threatens to destroy the process that made me want to become a filmmaker in the first place and turn something bespoke and beautiful into disposable, mass-produced junk. 🛋️

• CHAOS, DESPERATION, AND DYSENTERY ARE YOUR FRIEND: A broken shark, Harrison Ford getting, disagreeable dinosaurs - how Steven Spielberg turns obstacles into great art. 🦈

• ART WITHOUT COMFORT: Why easy art makes stories suck hard. 🛑

• DOUG LIMAN’S BITCOIN: The sobering reality of a 20-day shoot inside a plain gray box. 📦

• IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL: Why cutting out hundreds of people along the way makes our creative worlds — and our adventures — smaller. 🗺️

• WHAT WAS I THINKING WHEN I CALLED “THE PITT” MEDITATIVE?: The thrilling, heart-racing late-Season 1 turn that completely changed my perspective on “The Pitt”. 🏥

• '“SCRUBS”: A CURE FOR MIDLIFE CRISES: Finding something beautiful to cling to in the nostalgia and trauma-laden world of the sequel series. 🎛️

• THE IMPENETRABLE PRIZE WINNER: What happened when I put a paragraph from a Booker Prize-winning into AI three times to try to make sense of what it was trying to say? 📚

• THE REITMAN PRINCIPLE: What makes great films — and great directors according to Juno director Jason Reitman. 🎬

If you have any thoughts or questions about what we discuss today, drop them in the comments. Always here for a good debate about art.

And if you want more episodes like this one — or any of my audio essays and arts & culture interviews — to show up in your life, be sure to subscribe to 5AM StoryTalk!

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OTHER EPISODES/ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE YOU MIGHT ENJOY

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READ THE BREW JUNE 2, 2026

One of the things that completely confuses me about AI is how it negates so much of the process of storytelling that I value – especially in film and TV where more and more I hear from respected peers that they’re beginning to see aspects of AI as beneficial to the future of the artform.

Maybe, but let’s interrogate that a bit more since the process, at least in my opinion, is the point. Let’s talk about why I’m right…or maybe I’m wrong. I’ll leave that to you to decide.

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Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk, my friends. I’m Cole Haddon, and this is another edition of The Brew – a personal blog where, in between larger episodes – I share what I’m struggling with and sometimes even getting right as an artist in the 21^st century.

Today, I’m struggling a bit with the fact that many artists don’t feel the same as I do about process, which I don’t know if I’ll ever stop expressing confusion about, but which is nonetheless true and, I suppose, complicating how I view the use of AI in various aspects of the creative process.

For the sake of convenience here, I’m just going to use AI in the place of large language models or generative AI since most of us seem to have agreed to call it that even though it’s not actually intelligent in any way.

And maybe I should provide some context about how I feel about AI, because it will color a lot of other things I say here:

I’m 100% against calling anything created by AI - art.

But I also believe AI can be a tool like a lot of things. The question is, how do we use it as a tool given its limitations and its ability to even make us idiots?

For example, I use AI to help me research, but I know AI is just pointing me toward a possible fact – almost always with less reliability than any Wikipedia article. I have to fact-check everything because I know AI is dumber than a puppy with a head injury.

Take media entrepreneur and apparent dumbass Steven Rosenbaum, whose new book is called The Future of Truth: How AI Shapes Reality. Ironically, this book contains a bunch of quotes entirely made up by AI – which he used to research and edit.

Can you imagine how brilliant all this would be if it was an actual performance art piece to prove his point rather than just a colossal and embarrassing fuck-up?

So, yeah: AI – tool, for some things. Eventually, maybe a tool for a lot of things. At least that’s what some of my friends are telling me – friends whose work I respect.

Some wonder if – maybe even hope – it will soon allow disgruntled screenwriters to produce films and TV series from their unproduced scripts. This is a big thing for a lot of us who’ve never been allowed to have our stories told before, those of us who have largely toiled in development for years. You just want someone, anyone to experience the stories you’ve invested so much of yourself in.

Then there are those, like Doug Liman, who argue it’s a great way to cut down the cost of a film – which we can’t pretend doesn’t make sense to some degree, even if it means some kinds of artistry is impacted and maybe even largely wiped out.

This is, to some degree, the nature of the beast. Digital animation has almost entirely replaced hand-drawn animation. CGI largely replaced all the special effects techniques that had preceded it in film history. Sound replaced the silent film and destroyed countless careers.

I might be cherry picking cinematic tragedies here, but the point is: film an art form that’s meant to evolve and, I suppose, some argue that’s what AI is going to force it to do.

Coming back to Doug Liman, he’s more or less taking James Cameron’s Avatar argument – that you can produce any film entirely inside a studio soundstage – to its natural conclusion with his new film Bitcoin. Over 20 days, his cast never left a London soundstage, delivering their performances inside a plain, gray box. The global sets, every background, the lightning – basically, everything except the actors – was generated by AI in post-production.

I’ve asked a handful of director friends about this and received similar responses. Making films is hard, they’ve said, especially on location. Everything goes wrong all day long. You’re fighting the elements. You’re racing the sun. You’re sometimes dealing with political factors that force compromises down your throat.

Why not do what Liman did instead?

Every single shot, perfectly composed since there are no limitations, every location dreamed up by a set designer according to the director’s vision, every costume casually replaced with a new one if someone second-guesses it later. Day becomes night. Actors replaced. Actors’ performances improved. Hell, you can even put a new face an actor in the event they’re accused of a sex crime because, which happens a lot because men are terrible.

You get my point, I hope.

We’re talking about shot after shot so perfectly created – maybe we should call it manufactured – that almost nothing about it is…real.

Can this be done well?

Yeah, I’m sure it can. In fact, I’ve seen it done well…enough.

But more often than not, I’ve seen it done catastrophically.

In most cases where a filmmaker has unlimited resources, the end result is always brutally inferior to what was done with dramatically fewer resources and significantly greater obstacle – often decades earlier, too.

But I’m getting way off topic here. Let’s get back on track, that being: I don’t know why you would want to do this.

When I was a kid, the most valuable possession I had for the longest time was a book called The Art of the Return of the Jedi. I don’t know why my mother bought it for me, but I love her for it.

It’s barely in one piece today, that’s how much I abused it. It taught me what making a movie was about.

Later, I fell even more in love with the idea when I began watching making features and featurettes. By the early 90s, VHS tapes started coming with these. I discovered Lawrence of Arabia and the insane story of how it was made over more than a year. Stanley Kubrick’s work, kind of painting with cinema, melted my brain; the level of research and detail he brought to every shot is too much to appreciate without repeated viewings. By the time The Lord of the Rings came out on DVD, featuring what in my memory is dozens of hours of special features, I was already in Hollywood – but god, these features just reinforced what I knew all along.

I wanted to tell stories with the moving image.

I wanted to be a filmmaker – because it was fun.

I wanted to watch puppets be created.

I wanted to hold models of starships and monsters.

I wanted to pick costumes out.

Most of all, I wanted to travel to exotic locations to shoot these movies because that was an adventure.

Being on set was an integral part of these fantasies – not the success, not the triumph when you produce a hit or anything like that.

I wanted to make films, I mean.

The process was the point, I mean.

Steven Spielberg making Jaws on location, where everything went wrong – not right like it would’ve on some AI stage – that was the point.

Stanley Kubrick wading through thousands of Polaroids to create his surreal vision of New York City in Eyes Wide Shut was the point.

The Wachowski sisters working out how to make bullet time work was the point.

Peter Jackson criss-crossing New Zealand, making The Lord of the Rings, was the point.

And to go back to Spielberg, because his films very often prove why the point is the process and the process is chaos and that’s where greatness is most often found in filmmaking, consider Jaws:

The shark had to not work so Spielberg ended up keeping it mostly off screen and relying on John Williams’ score instead – which is why the film is so great.

Consider Raiders of the Lost Ark’s iconic scene where Indiana Jones faces down a sword-wielding adversary in a Cairo marketplace. Harrison Ford was meant to have a huge three-page fight with the guy, but Ford was weak from dysentery and, in his desperation to get off his feet, suggested just shooting the swordsman instead. Hilarious – brilliant – iconic now, like I said.

It also would never have happened on an AI set, because there wouldn’t have been a ticking clock.

They would’ve just squeezed shooting the fight in between some other stuff and let the AI fix it in post.

Consider Jurassic Park. The reason why the film’s CGI dinosaurs work so great is because Spielberg couldn’t get the puppets to look as convincing as he needed them to be. He was driven to shoot a combination of the two, transforming cinema forever as a result.

With unlimited AI tools, Spielberg’s unlimited options would’ve eliminated all of the film’s most innovative, moving moments.

More, it would’ve done it in ways that felt disconnected from reality – which is why later Jurassic Park films have failed to make the same kind of cultural impact, I’d suggest.

Because when anything is possible on a screen, our ability to relate to what’s happening on that screen – to the drama, to the suspense, to the peril – crashes.

So, in the end, in summary, these are the problems with AI replacing how we’ve made movies for 125 years and TV for 75.

Reason #1: the exigencies of production often lead to the most exciting, interesting, and enduring moments in a film or TV series.

An imagined sunset is never as memorable to a real one…you position Indiana Jones and a dozen diggers in silhouette in front of. That shot makes you go, “Holy fuck.”

Nobody says “Holy fuck” about a CGI shot like that because you know there’s nothing inherently amazing about it.

Reason #2 (building off that last point I just made: the less real something is, the more its relationship to something tangible is muddled, the more improbably it is that whatever is happening on screen will ever truly emotionally matter to a human being.

There’s a brilliant example of this in the history of craftsmanship and manufacturing. Look at a beautiful, hand-made coffee table – which I know a bit about as my grandfather was a carpenter and I wish I had some of his pieces now that he’s gone.

Consider the coffee table in question’s lines, its curves, its decorative grooves, the decisions that went into every feature – the way you immediately recognize a human author of its beauty.

Now, think about how you think about IKEA furniture:

Disposable - less than – junk for a starter apartment.

One you want to preserve for a century or more.

The other you assume is going to end up in a landfill in 10 years or less.

Reason #3 AI blowing up how we make films and TV (and this is the most important factor as far as I’m concerned): It’s the process. The fun of it. The whole point, as far as I’m concerned.

The reason I fantasized about making films as a kid.

The reason I packed up my life and moved from Detroit to L.A. to become a filmmaker.

The reason I still write scripts today.

I wouldn’t have done any of that if I thought the process would one day be standing around in a dark sound stage, perfectly realizing what was in my imagination, cutting out all the adventure, the chaos, the chance for experiences like the ones that inspired me in the first place.

Sure, you’re still working with a relative handful people. But you’ve cut out hundreds of people you’ll encounter along the way.

You’ve made your world smaller in the process.

You’ve made the process smaller.

And you’ve made me wonder: what’s the point?

In such a reality, I would’ve just dedicated my life to exclusively writing fiction instead – which, of course, is facing the same dilemma right now. The diminishment of the process in favor of convenience, of democratization, or McFiction, or something like that.

But as much as there are elements of truth in the advantages of AI as a tool in art, as I’ve said, you will not convince me that art is supposed to be easy.

Art that is easy tends to suck – hard.

Art without obstacles, without limitations to circumvent, without desperation tends to suck – hard.

Again, there will be exceptions, but in general, to repeat it yet again, the process is the point, my friends…at least as far as I’m concerned.

It’s like we say about life: it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

Maybe you don’t agree. If not, drop into the comments and tell me why I’m wrong.

Before I press on, I just want to remind you to hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. 5AM StoryTalk is a community of more than 11,000 artists and art fanatics across Substack and podcast players. At Substack, a subscription also gets you access to hundreds of writing, screenwriting, and culture essays and learning resources.

Okay, so in other not self-promotional news, just to catch you up on what I’ve been watching, reading, whatever:

I wrapped up Season 1 of “The Pitt” and…holy shit, guys, I was very wrong when I suggested to you this show is meditative.

I was only 2/3 of the way through the season, before the major event that blows things up for the Pitt’s team of medical professionals. Once that happens…I mean, wow. Heart-pounding.

My wife and I abandoned any notion of only one episode a week at that point, which I regret a little. I like the torture of waiting to find out what happens.

We’re both anxious to dive into Season 2 soon, but need a breather first.

We also wrapped “Scrubs’” new season, another medical show, albeit a sitcom.

It’s a bit weird how many details overlapped between the two shows, from intern archetypes to trauma-laden doctors, to patients out to harm themselves, to a kind of nostalgia for youth or at least a time in our lives when things were less terrible all the time.

If you haven’t caught the “Scrubs” sequel, reboot, requel, though, it’s incredibly worth it – especially if you’re middle-aged and dealing with any kind of midlife crisis of your own. Or maybe just anyone just wanting to watch something that recognizes how terrible things are, but relentlessly tries to find something good and beautiful to cling to.

But maybe don’t watch it at the same time as “The Pitt”, though. My wife stopped me at the end of Episode 10 “The Pitt’s” first season and asked where the British intern had gone.

Guys…she was remembering an intern from “Scrubs”.

Now, when it comes to books, which I don’t talk nearly enough about here, I’m slow-reading several at the moment, probably too many – but I did wrap one I will not name because, Jesus, impenetrable isn’t the right word for this Booker Prize winner.

Long, poetical paragraphs that meander and roll and…say nothing. Paragraphs that require multiple readings just to make sure nothing substantial was said and missed.

This is an ongoing problem with a lot of literary fiction I read these days. Authors with their heads so far up their asses that AI couldn’t make sense of them – and I know, because I put a paragraph of this prize winner into AI and asked for an explanation of it. I did tried three times, and each time got the most confusing responses – which is how I felt about said paragraph, too.

Ernest Hemingway was a sonuvabitch, don’t get me wrong, but I really wish he was still around to comment on the bad habit of authors making themselves impossible to read.

I shouldn’t have to work so hard to read your fiction, I mean. I should have to work hard to understand the depths of it.

Okay, we’re almost done for today, but I want to leave you with an artist’s quote, as I like to do.

Today’s comes from writer-director Jason Reitman, responsible for helming films like Juno, Up in the Air, and Tully. He said:

“Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments.”

Now, I ask you to wonder: what would a film be, what would a director be worth, if we removed the risk of mistakes, the risk of anything, from the process?

That’s it for now, StoryTalkers, except to say, I’m taking the week off next week, to focus on my feature spec and my quality of life, but I’ll be back in two weeks. See you soon, you beautiful people!