When I first saw Romain Gavras’s STORM, I became jealous.
Jealous that I hadn’t thought of it myself. That I hadn’t come up with those images, that movement, that choreography. That I wasn’t the one who went to Damien Jalet, to cinematographers like Lara Perrotte and Matias Boucard, and to the people around them and said, “I have this idea. Let’s make it.”
I think anyone creative has felt this kind of “jealousy”.
It’s not that you want to take someone else’s work. It’s more that feeling of “damn, why didn’t I think of that?” And somehow, it makes you want to go further. To create something of your own that might one day make someone else feel the same way.
And then came the AI trend.
Suddenly, something that, upon first glance, had seemed so difficult, so far beyond what I could do at the time, became simple. I can take that image, change the faces, change the world around them and create something that resembles it.
And now that I can make it, I no longer want to. Because I wasn’t just jealous of the result. I was jealous of everything it took to get there.
For me, that’s exactly where the joy of creating lies. In the idea that initially exists only in your head and somehow has to find its way out. You share it with someone, try to explain what you see, and they take it, add something of their own, and eventually all of that becomes something unique. Something that will make someone else “jealous”.
There was a time when, to create images, you had to find a way to access the tools. Today, those tools have come to us.
And perhaps that’s what makes me think most about AI right now. Not because I believe we should be afraid of new tools. Quite the opposite.
There was a time when, to create images, you had to find a way to access the tools. Today, those tools have come to us. YouTube brought us people who made videos on their own and essentially told us that all you need is to decide to start doing it. Cameras became more affordable, editing tools found their way onto our phones, and almost any knowledge you might need is available somewhere online. That’s exactly what’s so remarkable.
Because right now, somewhere out there, the greatest filmmaker of our generation might be filming latte art for a café. They might be making a reel that most of us will scroll past in two seconds.
But for that person, it might be another chance to try something. To work out how the light falls, where to place the camera, how to edit something a little better than the time before. And no one knows where that might lead.
So I don’t want AI to replace the process. I want it to become another tool within it. I don’t want to give it an idea and have it hand me back a finished piece of work. I want to keep coming up with ideas. To keep sharing them. To keep working on them with other people. To keep failing and getting back up. And that’s something I never want to change.
There’s that familiar saying that we want AI to wash the dishes so we can make art. That’s not quite what I want. I want to make art and wash the dishes too.
And I want to use AI only when I need it, without handing over any part of my daily life to it entirely. Even if I never make anyone “jealous”. Because if we can eventually create anything, perhaps the real challenge now is coming up with something that’s actually worth creating.
Vasilis Tsemberlidis is Creative Director at Because-Group.
