By Camila González Revoredo for Estudio Silver
Films touch us, transform us and connect us with deep emotions. In the age of artificial intelligence, a concern arises: can machines tell stories that really mark and reflect our experience?
“History helps us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,” a committed teacher told her young students. One of the students took this teaching to heart when choosing a career. She was interested in understanding the world, understanding the laws that govern phenomena and applying that knowledge to improve people’s lives. She shuffled through a few options: History, Psychology, Political Science, but decided to pursue Film Studies.
Cinema can be a window to the world, capable of generating intense emotions and awakening deep feelings. Who hasn’t turned to a sad movie to cry out, a comedy to laugh off, or a drama to find solace in someone else’s story during a rough patch? Cinema can even provoke physical reactions in us, such as stomach pain, nausea or even leave us sleepless. Cinema can make us see and hear unknown realities. Cinema can do all that and much more, and it is a great shaper of ideologies. Can algorithms take this role in our society and generate the cinema we want to see?
Technological revolutions have always generated opposition. Let’s think of great milestones of humanity such as the invention of the printing press, the Industrial Revolution or electricity. Now let’s think about cinema. The arrival of the new technology that allowed direct sound generated great impact, but also resistance. This theme is beautifully addressed in the classic Singin’ in the Rain (1952) directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Let’s take a big step back in time: today artificial intelligence is, without a doubt, a tool that is transforming the way we work in many fields, including our beloved film industry. This undeniable fact generates multiple debates, in addition to the typical fear of being replaced by the machine.
Hollywood on strike: the debate on creativity
The Hollywood labor disputes of 2023, with 148 days of strike action, will undoubtedly go down in the history books, not only for their huge national economic impact, which exceeded $5 billion, but also for the results of that struggle, led by the Screenwriters Guild and the Screen Actors Guild of America (SAG-AFTRA), accompanied by major figures such as the iconic Fran Drescher. Among other rights, they won a ban on AI writing or rewriting literary content: and any AI-generated material is not to be considered original material. This ensures that screenwriters’ credits are not altered, even if the studio gives them AI-generated material to adapt, guaranteeing them recognition as authors of the screenplay and not of the adaptation. The production company is thus obliged to inform the writer if AI-generated material is used.
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In Argentina we have not had, to date, a conflict of that magnitude and depth of the sector around this technology. But the issue did not go unnoticed. Some associations such as the Asociación Argentina de Editores Audiovisuales [Argentinean Association of Audiovisual Editors], EDA, organized workshops and talks on the subject. There were also dedicated conferences at the last Ventana Sur, the most important audiovisual market in Ibero-America held in Montevideo in December 2024.
Biases, misinformation and homogeneity
The term Artificial Intelligence is not new; several sources place it in the summer of 1956 in New Hampshire (USA), when a group of scientists from different disciplines met at the Dartmouth Conference and used computers to simulate aspects of human intelligence. During this meeting, the term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined, proposed by John McCarthy, one of the organizers of the meeting. Although no concrete breakthroughs were achieved, the conference established AI as a new scientific discipline.
But in recent years, artificial intelligence has ceased to be just a futuristic promise and has become part of everyday life, generating fascination and, at the same time, fear. Its uncontrolled advance and the lack of regulation raise doubts about the future of work, privacy and even information security. It is not only that it can write, draw or edit videos in seconds, but its ability to imitate and manipulate reality puts in check everything we understood as true: deepfakes, disinformation and massive automation.
It is essential to open the debate on the role of companies that own artificial intelligence software, especially when the content generated by these technologies tends to be homogeneous and predictable. Biases in AI come directly from the data with which it is trained. If the base information has inequalities of class, gender, geographic location, among many others, the model will reproduce them without questioning. It is not that the technology “thinks” this way, but it learns from a universe of information where these structures are in place. Therefore, there are systems that reinforce stereotypes in language, in the selection of images or in automated decision making. AI is not neutral: it reflects the biases of those who create it and feed it. The large corporations that control these tools are limiting the diversity of perspectives and voices, which negatively impacts creativity, freedom of expression and multiplicity of viewpoints. Instead of following algorithms that prioritize massiveness and efficiency, as a society we could support the use of free software with an active and sustained demand for States to generate public policies that guarantee a more open and diverse digital ecosystem, as this allows communities to access, modify and adapt the tools according to their own needs. Free software fosters innovation and promotes a more democratic Internet, in which decisions are not only made by a few actors, but by an inclusive and participatory network.
When AI is used ethically, it can be greatly beneficial to streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks, and combined with free software, it can greatly boost creativity. Communities can customize tools according to their needs, paving the way for collective innovation.
The Power of Human Intelligence in Translation and Subtitling
At Estudio Silver we translate and subtitle independent films so that local stories can resonate around the world. We believe that behind every film there are powerful stories that deserve to be shared, and that the particularity of local stories can reflect universal truths of the human experience.
Translating a film is a job that requires contact with one’s own sensibility. Languages are universes in themselves, each with its own cadence, nuances and particularities that reflect the culture of those who speak them. Subtitling films not only implies translating words, but also transmitting emotions, rhythms, climates and socio-historical contexts that need to be conveyed in the target language. Every story has its own pulse, and our goal is to keep that pulse intact, regardless of language boundaries. We believe that artificial intelligence is a valuable tool that can facilitate work processes, but never replace the human sensibility conveyed by those stories that give us value, whose reflection enriches us as human beings, and can even change our perspective on a subject matter forever. Machines do not have a life story to tell. They can process data, perform complex tasks and generate quick results, but they lack the human experience of incompleteness. Machines do not know the sadness of an ended relationship, the emotion of the first love, or the personal transformation that comes with overcoming a difficulty. They do not dream, they have no unconscious mind; they don’t know of spiritual quests, hunger or desire. The stories that really mark us are built from the complexity of human experience, something that machines, no matter how advanced, cannot replicate. In a world where narratives teach us, connect us and transform us, only human beings are capable of telling the stories that really matter.
Let’s think about the anecdote with which we opened this article. It is a scene that could happen every day in many classrooms around the world, thousands of miles away, in different time zones. What exact words would that teacher use? What are the signs of tenderness in her face or hands? Are you thinking of a teacher who marked you? At what moment in your life did that memory come back to you? Ask these questions to three people you know and you will get a wide variety of answers.
There is a popular saying: “Man is the only animal that trips twice over the same stone”. Throughout history, we have reacted with fear to major technological transformations, and artificial intelligence is no exception. The difference is that today’s growth is so dizzying that it is difficult for us to adapt to a new tool before a more advanced one emerges. That is why it is necessary to know, reflect and carry out an ethical use; demanding from the States the promotion, investment and incentive to develop these free software tools, promoting the minimization of biases and regulating the companies that work with these technologies.
Machines are inherently biased but we cannot ignore that people are biased too, because our view of the world is shaped by our history, culture and subjectivity. However, when a machine formulates stories, it does so not out of genuine impulse, but out of calculation. Humans need to give meaning to what we go through; we don’t just tell stories, we create them to understand ourselves, to connect with others, and to cope with our own existence. Our need for meaning is not a whim, but a way of inhabiting the world. Machines, on the other hand, lack subjectivity, a true experience of time, desire and death.
So, do stories define us as humanity, and can machines tell stories that truly mark and reflect us? And if we allow them to tell our stories, would we lose the essence of what makes us human?