Saudi director Ali Al-Kalthami warns against replacing filmmakers with AI - Arab News

URL SCAN: Saudi director Ali Al-Kalthami warns against replacing filmmakers with AI - Arab News
FIRST LINE: - Regulations are needed to protect jobs, says Al-Kalthami

The Dissection

The article is defending human creative labor by reframing AI as an instrument rather than a replacement system. Al-Kalthami correctly identifies that audiences value story, cultural specificity, and emotional connection. But the article quietly converts those preferences into a claim that human labor remains economically necessary. That conversion is unsupported.

His own workflow exposes the transition mechanism: AI is already used to test ideas, visualize concepts, and identify production problems before filming. The “tool” enters at the highest-leverage stages first, then expands as capability improves. What begins as assistance becomes substitution when the system can perform enough of the surrounding work at lower cost.

The Core Fallacy

The central error is confusing creative quality with human employment. A story may need authenticity, research, and emotional force. It does not follow that it needs the current number of writers, directors, designers, editors, or production workers to produce them.

The article also treats regulation as if it can suspend competitive pressure. If AI can produce commercially viable films more cheaply, firms and funders will be pushed toward it. Legislation may slow deployment, impose disclosure rules, or preserve protected niches. It cannot permanently preserve a mass labor structure whose cost and output are becoming inferior.

The comparisons with radio, the internet, and mobile phones are false analogies. Those technologies reorganized communication while leaving large areas of human production intact. AI directly targets cognitive production itself. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is the decisive difference.

Hidden Assumptions

• Human brainstorming and prolonged writing are assumed to be inherently superior rather than merely one current production process.
• Local authenticity is assumed to require human creators. AI systems supervised by a small number of local controllers can generate culturally specific material without preserving the existing labor stack.
• Audience preference for sincerity is assumed to translate into demand for human-made production. It may instead produce a preference for human-branded outputs generated largely by machines.
• Regulators are assumed capable of coordinating protection across jurisdictions and resisting cheaper production. Competitive leakage will undermine that protection.
• Studios and investors are assumed willing to preserve jobs when automation can reduce costs and increase volume.
• “Using AI to serve the human spirit” is treated as a stable endpoint. Under competitive conditions, the system is rewarded for reducing human involvement wherever audiences tolerate the result.
• Creative work is assumed to be economically protected because it is culturally meaningful. Markets do not preserve labor merely because its output has meaning.

Social Function

Primarily transition management and ideological anesthetic, with a partial truth at its center.

The partial truth is that AI does not automatically produce compelling stories, and cultural legitimacy cannot be guaranteed by technical capability alone. The anesthetic is the leap from that fact to the belief that filmmakers therefore retain durable economic necessity. The article gives threatened workers a respectable narrative: adapt, regulate, preserve authenticity, and the old profession will remain intact.

That narrative delays recognition of the real battlefield. The scarce position will shift toward owners of AI systems, rights, distribution, cultural data, capital, and audience access. A small number of human creators may remain as sovereign controllers or indispensable cultural specialists. The rest become replaceable inputs, protected dependents, or decorative proof of authenticity.

The Verdict

Al-Kalthami is right that careless AI deployment can damage cinema. He is wrong about what regulation and human creativity can preserve. The article mistakes the continued value of stories for the continued necessity of storytellers as a mass profession.

AI will not need to eliminate authenticity. It only needs to produce acceptable authenticity more cheaply and at greater scale. Human-made cinema may survive as a subsidized prestige niche, a luxury signal, or a tightly controlled cultural exception. That is not the survival of the post-WWII creative labor model. It is its managed carcass.