With the rise of AI documentaries, we outline the worrying tropes these projects can’t seem to escape
The Synthesis
As filmmakers increasingly rely on AI tools to optimize the editing process, we must ask: What is it teaching us to see, and what might we overlook as
As the distinction between AI’s use as an assistant and as a creative tool blurs, what this means for AI enhancement demands close scrutiny
Valerie Veatch traces the links between AI and eugenics in Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine , a self-funded documentary treatise made with
In this interview, Marc Isaacs discusses his latest provocation, a hybrid doc set at the fictional “Synthetic Sincerity Lab”
OpenAI’s Sora 2 mainstreams the collapse between irony and information, threatening the basic conditions under which documentary can operate
In this interview, Raoul Peck reflects on deploying AI-generated imagery to illuminate Orwell’s insights about linguistic manipulation
When making Deepfaking Sam Altman (2025), documentary director Adam Bhala Lough (Telemarketers) found himself in deep doo doo. Despite months of trying, he still hadn’t gotten access to an interview with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) for a film Lough had promised about AI. So he took a page from Altman’s own MO. The resulting film follows Lough setting about on his journey, working with deepfakers in India, meeting with lawyers, and ultimately spending a lot of time chatting and bonding with the resulting AI chatbot, called SamBot. For this edition of The Synthesis, we spoke with Lough about the film, his use of AI, and its implications for documentary.
In a recent joint submission to a call for contributions on AI and Creativity at the United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, WITNESS, the Co-Creation Studio at MIT, and the Archival Producers Alliance (APA) outlined these pressing dangers. Drawing from years of frontline research, workshops, and advocacy with creative communities and human rights defenders around the world, we identified seven core threats AI poses to human creativity.
Sora, a new generative AI video tool from Open AI, is named after the Japanese word for sky. Is the sky the limit? Last year, the company gave early access to 300 artists, some of whom later denounced the company’s product release as artwashing. OpenAI responded with a series of exclusive promotional screenings of artist-made films for industry executives in New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. What might this all mean for the documentary field? We decided to run our own experiment. To test the limits of Sora, we prompted it with the taglines from the six most recent Oscar-winning documentaries. We showed the resulting 15-second silent clips to a panel of seven documentary luminaries over Zoom.