AI Video Generators, Fact vs. Fiction and the Disruption of Hollywood
GENERATIVE AI TOOLS & AI SAFETY | March 4, 2026
by Adele Berry
For as long as I can remember, I've loved film and going to the movies. When I was in high school, I joined the film club. In college, I showed up for film and video club meetings just so I could borrow cameras to make silly film shorts, and a documentary starring my friends. When it came to selecting a graduate school, I wavered between film or photography. I decided on photography, thinking I had a better chance of making a living as a fashion photographer rather than a film director. But the recent developments in generative AI tools have brought me back to my love and secret wish to be a filmmaker.
Last June in 2025, I renewed my Midjourney subscription to generate images to feed into Runway, the same AI video generator (text-to-video tool) that my favorite AI artist, Kelly Boesch, was using at the time. Two years earlier, in 2023, I'd cancelled my Midjourney subscription frustrated by six-fingered people. "Five fingers! FIVE!", I kept prompting. Eventually, I grew frustrated and walked away.
But now I'm back. As I reminisce about my teenage years, I think about growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and how my friends and I roamed Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and the Haight in San Francisco, shopping for all things vintage: used clothing and lots of vinyl. As I started playing around with Midjourney again, I decided to make a short video about the nostalgia of vintage clothing, shopping for records and eating way too much greasy pizza with my friends. On my second attempt, I was able to make an AI generated video paying tribute to those youthful adventures.
But I made this video almost a year ago, and looking back on it now, it gives me the same sensation that you might have looking back on silent film while sitting in an IMAX theater. My video feels ancient; the motion is slow and labored. Today's AI generated videos, when done well, are completely realistic with the same qualities as actual video capturing real people.
AI generated video created by Adele Berry in June 2025With tools like Sora, Veo and Seedance 2.0, you can create realistic video clips that look almost as good as something out of Hollywood. Recently, a Seedance 2.0 video went viral of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt. The lighting, the landscape, everything about it looks like an authentic million-dollar film with a budget to afford A-list actors. But it isn't. It was generated with a two-line prompt by one person.
Hollywood is nervous, and they should be. What does this mean for filmmakers and cinephiles like me? You can now generate a film without the set directors, the costume designers, the cinematographers, and even the actors.
It's difficult to determine what is fact versus fiction. What does it mean when it looks real, but it isn't? Or when it is real, like footage of human rights violations, but it's dismissed as AI?
Three days ago, Vietnam joined China, South Korea, and the European Union in requiring AI-generated content to be labeled so that people can distinguish fact from fiction. Vietnam is the first country in Southeast Asia to pass such a law. That seems like a really good idea to me.