The Heist Is Proof That AI Filmmaking Is Not the “Death of Hollywood”

I don’t know about you, but throughout 2024, my social media feeds contained numerous examples of AI filmmaking, i.e., short films and videos created by text-to-video generators like OpenAI’s Sora. What’s more, these films were frequently accompanied by celebratory text crowing about how they represented the death of Hollywood and traditional filmmaking.

The most recent example that I’ve seen is The Heist, a two-minute short created by Jason Zada using Google’s Veo 2. As the name suggests, it depicts a bank thief leading the police on a chase through the city before he’s finally cornered. At which point, he says, “Looks like we got a new king of video.”

To be fair, Zada is an award-winning filmmaker with some significant accolades to his name. And The Heist does look a good deal better than 2023’s nightmare-inducing Heidi trailer. And yet, for all of the time and effort that Zada poured into the short, The Heist is still pretty underwhelming. Underwhelming and disheartening.

All of that computing power and environmental waste — generative AI consumes millions of gallons of water every year, by the way — and what do you get? A car chase that’s dull and haphazard. And never mind the fact that the thief’s car, appearance, and/or clothing change in nearly every shot, or that the driver’s side window disappears when he gets in his car, or that he switches sides inside his car… the list of continuity errors goes on.

Zada admits that no cleanup or color correction was done to the short; everything you see is just what Veo 2 generated, which would certainly explain the aforementioned flaws and continuity errors. But that also proves that AI, on its own, cannot make a good film, regardless of how advanced it might get.

The “promise” of AI is that you can create any film that you desire. As one commenter writes, “[y]ou choose the genre, the plot twists, even the actors’ faces. All with just a few prompts.” But if The Heist is any indication, it will still require significant human effort to clean up every AI-generated shot and scene. In other words, a human filmmaker — not an AI tool simply fed a bunch of prompts — will need to make in-depth and minute directorial and editorial decisions to ensure something approaching a coherent film.

That takes time and effort, however, whereas much of what I see in AI-generated art is more an excuse to be lazy, to let the machines do the hard work of creating and imagining for us — and very poorly at that. Tech bros love this; it’s part and parcel with their “disrupt all the things” mindset. Meanwhile, the rest of us can see this crap for what it really is: pale imitations and shameless knockoffs that ultimately undermine our shared notions of what is real and true.