As artificial intelligence continues to develop at accelerating rates, major brands and businesses in the entertainment industry are working towards integrating the new technology into their projects. Evan Halleck, a visual effects artist for the Academy Award-winning 2022 science-fiction film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” said in an interview with Variety that AI assistance when working with labor-intensive visual effects was a tool he wished he had known about sooner. Supporters of AI point out the benefits of reduced costs, faster production and newfound opportunities for smaller businesses. Though there are some uses that are more ethical than others, like helping save time on labor-intensive work with slight assistance from AI, the cons generally outweigh the pros. With that being said, AI generally has a negative impact on entertainment, as it rewards creators who mass-post low effort content while discouraging humans from gaining experience in the craft, lowering production quality across film, music and literature.
AI is not at the stage where it can make a full movie on it’s own, as it does not output Hollywood-standard media. And it had never been used to make a full movie on its own until April 2025, when Malaysian and Singaporean film companies FizzDragon and Future Studios premiered the first feature-length film with AI visuals, actors and scripting, “Pirate Queen: Zheng Yi Sao.” The film released theatrically in Malaysia on Jan. 1 and has since received a rating of 1.5 stars on movie review-aggregator site IMDb, indicating that AI cannot engage audiences and prompt positive reception, as most of the movie was still images of characters or scenery with an AI-generated voice/mouth on top of the character.
Beyond film, AI’s implementation across the entertainment industry loosely discourages real creators as the algorithm continues to reward low-quality, mass-produced slop. With the music industry, AI artists like Xania Monet are charting on the Billboard Hot 100 and getting record deals. Artists that use only AI are insulting all human-created music; both the machine and the person behind the machine miss out on the creative process of making music that builds expertise in that field. Many musicians that are ten times better than AI musicians struggle to make a living off of music, while AI models with no real talent (like Monet and other artists like The Velvet Sundown) get millions of streams and even record deals. Real artists put time and effort into their music, but the same can’t be said for AI artists. Monet has put out three full albums since July 2025, . In that same time frame, a normal artist could make one album before mixing (blending instruments and vocals) and mastering (making sure the music will sound high-quality across all devices and settings), assuming they use all of their demos, according to TYX Studios. In turn, this lowers the authenticity of music, which plays a major part in defining music as “good” and “bad.” An artist who shares personal experiences that are relatable to their audience is not the same as an AI pretending to relate to humans. One major reason people make music is to form a connection with their audiences, and without the artist getting vulnerable in one way or another, they will never connect to their audience. Because AI has no emotions, it cannot form these connections anyway.
AI chatbots download everything they can access on the internet without asking for consent from the artists. Recently, this has caused outrage among artists. With no other ways to protect their art from AI, some visual artists have taken a last-ditch effort and begun putting a very low opacity layer of math equations over their art so when the AI steals their work, it will be too confused by the math to steal their image and use it as reference, or it will store the image under the wrong tags. Most of the time, artists don’t even know that their work has been stolen by AI, according to professional artist Julia Bausenhardt’s blog. This is why “fake” AI music, art, writing, videos and images are considered “slop;” they are all incredibly mediocre and very similar to each other, lacking true innovation. Again, this plays into the authenticity factor of entertainment. The ability for artists to get personal is crucial to audiences, and that human connection is stripped away as soon as art comes from a machine.
Another way AI is being used in film is to digitally reconstruct actors’ faces to make them look younger, showing that AI can be used responsibly, as a tool rather than as the creator. This technique has been used for years, but it takes intensive hours of manual labor. This particular example of AI use is ethical if used with the consent of the actors, as it is merely an aid for VFX artists to save them time. In his 2019 film “The Irishman,” Martin Scorsese used AI technology to make Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci look up to 50 years younger without their performance being restricted by tracking dots, a technology that helps VFX artists render human faces in post-production. Because this form of AI only assists artists and saves them hours of work, it is more ethical than fully machine-generated uses.
If we had no entertainment, we would have no culture. While AI may have been trained on an extensive database of years of humanity’s experience and entertainment, it still does not and will never know what it truly means to be a human, since it cannot experience feelings, senses or community like a real human would. As a byproduct, invalidating its art and role in the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry is an industry that has always and will continue to belong to humans and has no room to allow completely machine-generated content to overtake human work.
