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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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It seems like you're asking to take more of a producer (maybe director) role on the project, to use the cinematic terms. I doubt those roles are really "one-shot" even for human workers. Maybe the executive producers for auteur directors are hands off, but a lengthy timeline of "lets review the progress and the plan" at various stages (storyboards, production planning) is what I'd expect there. The producer isn't designing the costumes, say, but does provide feedback on them and how the whole project fits together to steer the final product.

Using AI can be like directing as a baseline, but I really think it should have more ability for in-depth, hands-on customization. For example, if you want to customize the costumes, the AI should create a fancy GUI, so you can faster and with more precision than communicating to a professional (or prompting a chatbot). Because it's not just the director that determines the quality of the final product, but the actors, sound designers, etc. and if your actors, sound designers, etc. are all Claude, I think the final product will be disconcertingly generic no matter how well you prompt it.

Film is an interesting example, and I agree with you. I think that if a Blender-produced movie was made with:

  • Human-designed character and setting art
  • Human script
  • Human voice actors (at least for main roles) And AI that
  • Adapted the art designs into Blender characters and background
  • Designed and executed the scenes according to human direction
  • Was able of being easily overridden (e.g. the humans didn't just let the AI do everything, but would manually place the camera and say "now I want the scene to start here, and the camera pan slowly over 20 seconds to here," or "no I want this shade of green for this guy's shirt")

It would come off as a human movie, with a non-generic human vision, but could plausibly be made much more quickly and cheaply than manually animating all of it. I'd find that much more palatable as an artistic work than telling an AI to "one-shot a movie, sci-fi, 1980s retro, synthwave, make no mistakes" or what have you.

I hope for new styles that are easy to make with AI but don’t give the ugly “AI” look. Probably because the AI’s work is mostly from the final product and allowed to be generic and redundant without issue, like code. And these won’t obsolete traditional artists, who I have sympathy for, but I wouldn’t prevent the printing press to save the careers of scribes.