Artificial intelligence and Black storytelling 

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an inextricable part of daily life. It can write, design, analyze, imitate voices, generate images, and create increasingly sophisticated video. For filmmakers, AI promises to perform in minutes tasks that once required teams of people, substantial budgets, and weeks of work.

But those possibilities also raise difficult questions, particularly for Black filmmakers and other artists whose stories, images, music and cultural traditions have historically been appropriated, misrepresented or excluded from mainstream media.

A recent panel discussion presented by the Pan African Film Festival explored the issues surrounding AI’s growing role in filmmaking, creativity and the presentation of Black culture.

The conversation brought together professionals whose careers span filmmaking, journalism, academia and film production. Panelists included award-winning journalist, television presenter, producer and filmmaker Monique Walton; media scholar and educator Mark D. Cunningham, chair of the Radio-Television-Film Department at Austin Community College; filmmaker, screenwriter and director Nnegest Likké; Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and producer Andrew Munger; and award-winning producer and Pan African Film Festival Director of Festival Operations and Media Development J’Tasha St. Cyr.

Together, they presented a complicated picture of technology that could simultaneously democratize filmmaking and threaten the authenticity, ownership, and humanity at the center of Black storytelling.

Munger is the founder of Toronto-based Ultra Magnetic Productions and a filmmaker with more than three decades of experience in documentary and unscripted television. He is the executive producer of the PAFF award-winning documentary Play it Loud! How Toronto Got Soul.  Munger is particularly cautious about AI’s use in nonfiction storytelling.

“Speaking specifically from the documentary and unscripted perspective, AI is very concerning for our art and craft because we are representing reality,” Munger said. “It’s an interpreted reality; it’s a point of view. It’s a slippery slope once you start using artificial content that’s created by an AI rather than by humans; I think you’re on thin ice.”

That problem becomes even more significant when the subject is Black history and culture.

Cunningham, whose scholarly work examines film, television, Black filmmakers, race, identity and media’s cultural influence, stressed that there is no single definition of the Black experience.

“Black culture encompasses so many different things,” Cunningham said. “The thing to remember about Black people is that we’re not a monolith. One of the biggest things that we fight culturally is this idea that being Black means being one way. But there are  so many examples that we can point to about Black culture and all of it is worth preserving.”

Artificial intelligence is largely trained by processing enormous bodies of existing material. If those sources contain stereotypes, historical omissions or distorted portrayals of Black life, AI can potentially reproduce those same limitations on an unprecedented scale.

But technological disruption can also create opportunity.

St. Cyr, an award-winning producer, CEO and founder of entertainment company Miss Everything, sees AI as another technology that can lower barriers that have traditionally prevented independent Black filmmakers from competing with well-financed studios.

“Technology is kind of leveling the playing field,” St. Cyr said. “Now everybody has access to it.”

Historically, independent Black filmmakers often had to find alternative ways to finance and produce their movies when studios were unwilling to support their work. St. Cyr pointed to filmmakers such as Spike Lee and John Singleton, whose careers demonstrated the importance of Black creators finding ways to bring their own stories to the screen.

AI could potentially expand those opportunities.

From a producer’s perspective, St. Cyr said AI can accelerate workflows, reduce budgets and broaden creative possibilities. During pre-production, filmmakers can use it to help develop concepts, story arcs, storyboards and characters. It can also assist with production budgets and schedules, script development and elements of post-production.

For independent filmmakers working with limited resources, those efficiencies could be transformative.

Walton, whose career spans news, documentary, travel programming and digital storytelling, sees a similar potential advantage.

“If you need a lot of extras, or if you need to build a set that you don’t have the money for,” Walton said, AI could mean “the difference between being able to make a film or not.”

For an independent filmmaker, digitally creating a crowd, extending a location, or constructing an environment that would otherwise be unaffordable may provide production value previously available only to studios with multimillion-dollar budgets.

That distinction—between using AI to accomplish something that otherwise could not be afforded and using it simply to eliminate paid creative workers—may become one of the central ethical questions surrounding the technology.

Likké, the award-winning writer and director of the Fox Searchlight romantic comedy Phat Girlz, has built a career around culturally rich stories involving Black identity, relationships and connections between African and African American experiences. Asked whether technology could ever replace her personal experiences as a storyteller, her response was unequivocal.

“Absolutely not.”

Likké argued that Black creativity has repeatedly survived imitation and appropriation because it continually evolves.

“Every time Black culture is appropriated, we always reinvent ourselves,” she said. “Not because we’re trying, but just because we’re just regenerative. That’s why we are the resource that the entire world and every other culture takes from.”

AI could  broaden the battle over intellectual property because creators of every background now face similar concerns about their work being absorbed into AI systems.

“Now that everyone’s IP is being sourced by AI, everyone understands it,” she said. “Now this can be a global fight. I think the film industry is going to lead the way in this fight.”

Cunningham pointed to contradictions in society’s attitudes toward intellectual property. People may condemn AI for appropriating creative material while routinely downloading and reposting photographs or other online content without permission.

“It’s still theft of intellectual property,” he said.

Another form of theft that often receives less attention is AI’s physical infrastructure.

“We also have to think about the environmental impact of AI and data centers and how they affect the Black community,” Walton said. “It’s taking the water, it’s taking the electricity, it’s taking everything. That extraction from the land and from the people is happening in conjunction with us talking about AI as a storytelling tool.”

Ultimately, however, Walton returns to something much more fundamental—the emotional and communal experience of making art.

“Filmmaking and the creative process are all about the people,” she said. “Creating a film is one of the best collective artistic experiences that you can have.”

A film emerges from the interaction of writers, actors, directors, cinematographers, designers, editors, musicians and countless other creative contributors working toward a shared vision. For Walton, storytelling is fundamentally an empathetic medium designed to make audiences feel something.

“I haven’t seen anything made by AI yet that has moved me emotionally,” she said. 

Technology can reproduce an image, imitate a style and analyze generations of existing work. What it cannot possess is the lived experience behind those stories—the memory, humor, struggle, contradictions, cultural understanding and human connection that give them meaning. Whatever role artificial intelligence ultimately assumes in filmmaking, Black filmmakers remain necessary and integral to preserving Black culture, interpreting the Black experience, and ensuring that Black stories are not merely generated but authentically presented, understood, and told.