The Human Voice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

 

I am, at heart, an old-fashioned romantic who still holds onto the worldview I grew up with. Yet the world I knew is gone.

Artificial intelligence has arrived like a fissure across the fabric of society.AI is not a new idea. It has lived in our imagination for nearly a century. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis envisioned a society ruled by machines. Star Trek introduced “the ultimate computer.” Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey gave us HAL, the dispassionate voice of machine logic. For decades, AI haunted our cultural consciousness. Today it is no longer speculation but reality.

As a film and television producer, I can already imagine a future where a director creates an entire project with AI and no crew at all. Filmmaking has always been a collective art, where writers, actors, cinematographers, designers, editors, and countless craftspeople work in harmony to transform words into images. That collaboration has been central to storytelling. Now AI threatens to upend it.

Curious, I tested this myself. I submitted a script to ChatGPT for analysis, not to write or rewrite but to audit. What my assistant usually completes in several days, the AI processed in minutes. Its report was alarmingly thorough, missing nothing my assistant would have flagged. The exercise confirmed AI’s utility as a tool but also reinforced the irreplaceable value of human oversight. Creativity, intuition, and emotional nuance remain ours alone. Even so, it is clear that future productions will require a dedicated AI department.

The reach of AI in filmmaking is already significant. Pre-production is evolving as AI analyzes geographic data, historical filming locations, and even weather patterns to determine ideal shoot sites. Casting is being reshaped as AI reviews actors’ past performances and predicts their suitability for roles. In visual effects, AI cuts the time and cost of computer generated imagery, generating lifelike digital characters and seamless worlds that were once prohibitively expensive. Animation is being transformed as AI replaces cumbersome motion capture technology with direct performance analysis. Post-production is shifting too, as AI automates editing, colour correction, and sound design, while suggesting cuts based on industry trends.

But AI does not arrive alone. In its wake comes an army of lawyers. Who owns an AI generated image, a synthetic voice, or a piece of music written by algorithm? AI draws on a century of human creativity to generate content, but is what it produces truly original or simply a collage of what came before? Copyright challenges are immense. Platforms such as Instagram embrace AI for playful short videos where at least some human choice remains visible. Yet the same technology can generate photorealistic images of real people in fabricated situations. That is both a legal and ethical minefield. Spain has already proposed fines for AI generated content that is not labelled as such. Other governments will soon follow as they scramble to regulate technology that is advancing faster than law can keep pace. Ironically, lawyers themselves will likely use AI to navigate the very regulations they are drafting.

Though my perspective is rooted in filmmaking, AI’s disruption is felt across every industry: law, medicine, education, finance, and transportation. I do not claim to have the answers, only the perspective of someone who has lived through major technological transformations before. Cinema itself has evolved through radical leaps. Silent film gave way to sound. Black and white gave way to colour. Celluloid gave way to digital. Each shift felt revolutionary, even threatening. In hindsight, each became another step in the art form’s natural progression.

My hope is that AI will be remembered in the same way. Not as the end of human creativity, but as an innovation that expands our ability to tell powerful and compelling stories. The human voice, however, must remain at the heart of it all.