The internet says Hollywood is cooked — but I think Jia Zhangke’s AI short says something far more interesting

Whenever an action-packed or unusual AI-generated short goes viral, the same cry rings out on social media: Hollywood is cooked! This week it's an AI-generated Brad Pitt fighting an AI-generated Tom Cruise (made all the more ironic because Cruise famously does his own stunts instead of letting CGI handle them); the other day it was Kanye West singing in Mandarin in a music video; today it's a close-up of Spider-Man swinging at high speed. But if you're looking to those shorts to see the future of film, you're probably looking in the wrong place.

All three of those videos are slop. Impressive slop if you don't look too hard or think too much about them, but slop nevertheless. The ones gleefully ripping off big studios' best-known properties will no doubt become a dying breed as Hollywood's lawyers get going, but even if they were made from 100% artisan, organic, not-nicked-from-anyone content they'd still be slop.

You know that feeling of disconnection you get in a movie when two CGI robots bash lumps out of each other and you couldn't care less? That's what I get from those. Which is why I think you should watch this short by Jia Zhangke instead.

Why this Seedance short is different

The short is called Jia Zhangke's Dance, and it's a much more gentle affair than most of the AI video that gets attention: there are no crashing airliners or speeding Cybertrucks in it, no AI-generated Tom Cruises or Kanye Wests. Instead, it's a conversation between the "real" Zhangke and his AI... clone? Agent? I'm not sure. And that's the point: Zhangke wants you to think about AI and its potential relationship with creators. The filmmaker produced it and is in it twice, but he did not act in it: the two versions of him in the short are both AI-generated.

Zhangke explains: "If this short film can make audiences pause and reflect on the essence of creation after they've had a laugh, then its existence has already been meaningful. As for the answer, like Al, I'm still learning."

It's not perfect by any means. Visually some of it still has that unreal sheen that AI-generated video tends to have, and some of the conversation is a little stilted. But it feels a lot more human than most of the AI stuff I've seen, and it's worth a thousand bits of blatant copyright infringement that don't do much more than say "Look! Look! Look at the shiny thing!"

Spectacle and circus tricks

With most AI-generated clips I'm reminded of the very early days of cinema when the sheer novelty of stuff on a screen was enough to get people excited about watching a train roll into a station, or more recently during the various 3D film crazes when every second object or actor would loom out of the screen for no good reason, or when I saw a Star Wars movie in 4DX and got sprayed with water when Luke Skywalker stood on a rainy cliff. That stuff is just spectacle and circus tricks. What keeps us in the movie, what makes movies matter, is storytelling. That's what Zhangke's short is trying to deliver, and what the Pitt/Cruise punch-up isn't.

Once you've watched it, I'd thoroughly recommend also checking out writer/director Zack Morrison's posts on X, like this one where he explains why a Spider-Man short is just "a screensaver" because "There's no story or dramatic spine to the scene."

I don't think Hollywood is cooked, although I do think, like any new tech, the bean-counters in studios are going to push hard to use AI in production to cut their costs and jettison jobs: this is an industry motivated mostly by money, which is why for example California's animation industry has been decimated by production moving to states with better tax breaks or to countries with lower labor costs. And the lazier the filmmaking, the more AI is likely to feature: for many films the studio's goal is to make monetizable content, not art.

Slop wasn't invented by AI; it's been part of the movie business since the very beginning. But that business has also attracted genuine artists, filmmakers with ambition and talent who want to make movies that matter. And for those filmmakers, AI is just another tool.

As Zhangke writes: "I'm not worried about technology 'replacing' film. From its inception, film has always coexisted with new technologies. The camera itself was once an unsettling invention, but today it's part of our everyday life. What truly matters is how people use technology."

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

The best business laptops for all budgets

➡️ Read our full guide to the best business laptops
1. Best overall:
Dell Precision 5690
2. Best on a budget:
Acer Aspire 5
3. Best MacBook:
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M4)