Most debates about AI and cinema circle the same two questions: will it save the film industry, and will it make movies more original? Kevin Chang isn’t convinced either one is the question that matters.

His starting point is film criticism itself. “I’ve always felt that the most insightful film reviews aren’t really about deciding whether a movie is good or bad,” he writes. “They’re about understanding what a director is trying to express and seeing how that idea connects to their earlier work.”

That kind of reading doesn’t come cheap. “The more films you watch, the more you start to notice recurring themes, visual language, storytelling choices, and how a filmmaker’s perspective evolves over time. That kind of understanding doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from years of watching films and learning about film history, culture, art, and the world those films were made in.”

Which is why his AI question is different from everyone else’s: “What interests me more is whether AI can help more people become thoughtful storytellers with their own perspectives and cultural awareness.”

It’s a quietly contrarian position. The industry conversation is dominated by production: cheaper VFX, faster previz, generated shots. Chang points at the other end of the pipeline, the audience, and the storytellers audiences eventually become. Every distinctive filmmaker started as an obsessive watcher, and film literacy is the raw material of authorship. If AI can compress those “years of watching” into a guided education, explaining why a director holds a shot, what a cut is doing, where an image sits in film history, then it isn’t replacing creativity. It’s manufacturing the conditions for it.

Chang is careful about where originality actually lives: “AI can certainly make filmmaking more accessible, but originality still comes from people. If AI can help us learn how to watch films more carefully, understand why creative decisions are made, and appreciate how directors communicate through images, sound, characters, and structure, that could be one of its most meaningful contributions to cinema.”

Accessibility without literacy just produces more content. Accessibility with literacy, meaning more people who understand why creative decisions are made, is how you get better films. The tools are racing ahead of the taste, which makes Chang’s reframe worth stopping on. The most important thing AI teaches the next generation of filmmakers may not be how to generate. It may be how to see.

Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Kevin Chang, who works across AI filmmaking, industry research, and film criticism. Republished and expanded here with his permission.