AI Video Generators, Fact vs. Fiction and the Disruption of Hollywood
AI DEVELOPMENTS, AI ART & AI SAFETY | March 4, 2026 | Blog Post
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 so I could borrow cameras and make goofy, experimental video clips. Eventually, I made my first real video, a short documentary that my roommate helped me create.
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 this love and my 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. Exasperated, I walked away.
But now I was back. As I recalled my teen years, I thought about growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and how my gang of friends and I roamed the counter-culture hubs of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and the Haight in San Francisco. We shopped for all things vintage and alternative: used clothing and rare vinyl B-sides.
As I started playing around with Midjourney again, I decided to make a nostalgic video short about thrift store clothing, buying records and eating way too much greasy pizza with my eccentric co-conspirators.
After generating hundreds of images with tens of prompts, I had my prized few to animate in Runway. With a little help from Adobe Photoshop and Express, I managed to make an AI-generated video paying tribute to those long-past adventures.
But I made this video (below) almost a year ago, and looking back on it now, it gives me the same sensation that you might have watching a silent film while sitting in an IMAX theater. My video feels ancient; the movement is labored and the people seem to move in slow motion like they’re underwater.
AI generated video created by Adele Berry | June 18, 2025Today's AI-generated videos, when done well, are completely realistic with the same high visual fidelity and cinematic look as a professional production. The improvement in quality in just one year is incredible.
With 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 destroyed, apocalyptic landscape and everything about it looks like an authentic million-dollar film with the budget to afford A-list actors. But it isn't. It was generated by one person with a two-line prompt.
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.
This development is even more disruptive because it makes it difficult to determine what is fact versus fiction. What does it mean when it looks real, but isn't? And what about when it is real, like a crime committed, 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 this type of law.
That seems like a really good idea to me.
Updated March 9, 2026