This weekend, at the Busan film festival in South Korea, filmmakers described how they work with artificial intelligence. Among them was Kim Sung-soo, director of one of the biggest recent hits in Korean cinema, who is shooting a short film partly generated by AI.
A producer made a striking observation. Without professionals to guide the AI, she explained, faces look alike, sets look alike, lighting looks alike. Everything ends up looking alike.
Her team therefore now only recruits AI artists who have already made at least one real short film. And a new role has appeared on her shoots: AI coordinator.
Why everything looks alike
It is no accident. A generative AI learns from millions of images, and it naturally tends towards what is most probable: the most flattering light, the most common framing, the most harmonious face. The result is often pretty. And that is precisely the problem: it looks like everything else.
Left to itself, AI produces a kind of perfect average. But the average, by definition, has no style.
What is a style?
One might think that style is a way of embellishing. It is almost the opposite: it is a way of choosing.
A style is decisions that recur. A filmmaker who always shoots from a distance. A writer who uses short sentences. A painter who refuses blue. Style is recognisable as much by what one does as by what one forbids oneself.
In 1969, the writer Georges Perec published La Disparition, an entire novel written without ever using the letter "e". An absurd constraint, on the face of it. It produced one of the most singular books in French literature. Style is often born of a limit one imposes on oneself.
In 1753, the naturalist Buffon delivered his speech of admission to the Académie française, devoted not to nature, but to style. In it he asserts that knowledge and discoveries can pass from one person to another, but that style belongs to the one who writes. The phrase has remained famous: style is the man himself. In other words, style is not a veneer: it is the trace of a person in what they do.
Can AI have one?
It can imitate many. Ask it "in the style of", and it complies, often very well.
But imitating a style is not having one. To have a style, you have to make choices that cost: refusing what would be easier, insisting where others would move on, keeping an imperfection because it says something. An AI refuses nothing of its own accord. It proposes. It is someone beside it who chooses.
That is exactly what the filmmakers in Busan were saying. Kim Sung-soo, who once saw AI as a threat to cinema, has integrated it into his work. But according to him, one thing does not change: what makes a film truly cinematic. And that is still always decided by humans.
What it changes
We feared AI would kill style. It may well produce the opposite effect: by making the average free and infinite, it makes singularity rarer, and therefore more precious.
When anyone can obtain a perfect image in a few seconds, what stands out is no longer perfection. It is someone's touch. We recently asked ourselves what it means to create when everything already exists. Part of the answer may lie there: to create is to choose among the infinite.
What we take away
AI can produce a thousand images in a minute. It cannot decide which one matters, or why.
Style has never been in the tool. It has always been in the hand, and in the eye, of the one who uses it.