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On a hot and muggy Manhattan evening this week, hundreds of people lined up outside Lincoln Center for a night of film with AI on the marquee.
With more than 1,000 attendees, the startup Runway’s splashy third annual AI Film Festival felt more extravagant than two prior iterations, when a smaller crowd of AI enthusiasts huddled into a small retro theater downtown. This was the first year the organizers opened the doors to the general public, and it was the first to be held uptown in the stately complex that also hosts the New York Film Festival.
This year, more than 6,000 filmmakers submitted shorts that incorporated generative AI techniques in some way—a far cry from the 300 entries the inaugural event garnered in 2023.
The event’s evolution has matched the rapid progress in the video generation technology underlying it. Gone are the days of crude distortions; AI video seems to have fully crossed the uncanny valley of late, with hyper-realistic imagery and even audio to match. Some previous trouble with rendering less-alien humans seems more or less solved. Hands now usually boast the correct number of fingers (though they do sometimes glitch).
The 10 finalists, chosen by a jury that spanned big-name Hollywood directors, producers, and technologists, seemed less interested in lifelike fidelity than leaning into the dreamy aesthetics of the emerging medium. More Tears Than Harm stitched together scenes from a Madagascar childhood with the look of a neon painting. Fragments of Nowhere wove a transdimensional narrative out of distorted images of bodies and other unreal AI figments. Other styles included cyberpunk anime and flashes of body horror.
“Two years ago, it was, like, very blurry, pixelated, very abstract, very niche. And so it’s much more of an artistic community that was very drawn by the type of format,” Runway co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told Tech Brew. “It’s transitioning now mostly to narrative-driven stuff. Part of it is just people moving away from the technology for the sake of the technology itself. That narrative is just fading out a little bit.”
The film festival comes as companies like OpenAI, Google, and Runway continue to court Hollywood studios and directors, despite some industry resistance (Runway announced a partnership with AMC Networks the day before the event.) New AI-centric studios are emerging, and Vulture reported this week that use of AI in entertainment is already widespread, even if some companies and creators avoid drawing attention to it.
Runway made early headway in Hollywood with notable use of its editing tools in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It’s now become an established player, with a host of entertainment partnerships for its studio of AI video and editing tools.
“We’re seeing a lot of acceptance, perhaps less vocal, perhaps less public, but everyone is exploring it today,” Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz, co-founder and chief design officer at Runway, told us. “We’re in big conversations with many, many studios today that have not been publicly announced, but it’s a very different world than it was a few years ago, where there was a little bit more friction.”
Runway has tried to bill itself as more creator-centric—its co-founders met in art school—with events like the film festival and community meet-ups around the world. The New York event will be followed by separate film festival events in Los Angeles and Paris.