The last day of the Congress of the International Confederation of Audiovisual Authors AVACI, on November 7, featured the talk "The Impact of New Technologies - such as AI - on the Profession of Screenwriters and Directors," delivered by German filmmaker and screenwriter Christoph Behl. This is a topic that is increasingly occupying much of the agenda in the audiovisual world.
The director of films such as El desierto, El patio, and El camino del vino gave a lecture on Artificial Intelligence (AI), explaining how he uses the tool in creating his works and outlining the possibilities and concerns it generates. This led to a significant number of questions and reflections from the attending authorial leaders. Behl emphasized the importance of demanding transparency regarding the dataset.
Referring to the dataset, he highlighted the need to know the source that trains the machine, as well as the "proof of humanity" and "provenance," to determine if, for example, an image has been modified, and thereby continue protecting the rights of the authors involved in the works.
The starting point of his talk traced back to the first steps in this field by Google, which many years ago developed reasoning around AI to discover relationships within these models and build logic with words and images.
A New Language in Audiovisuals
To emphasize that, at this moment, it is very difficult for generative AI to replace writers or filmmakers: “It’s difficult today to work with ChatGPT if you want it to do something creative. I think that for another ten or fifteen years, it won’t be creative. In circles of directors and actors, we see a lot of concern,” but he noted that “they’re not coming to replace us for now.”
The growing concern in the industry has served as raw material for Propiedad, the film Behl is currently working on. The story centers around a company created to host transhumans (people who maintain a digital consciousness after death). In this film, the visionary dies and conducts the first trial of humanity to retain his property, against his daughter. "A large part of the movie is created with AI, depicting where these transhuman characters live. The first step is the writing. Advances in writing are huge; a lot of things can be done," he shared.
The German director mentioned that he has regained time away from the computer thanks to AI. When he has an idea, he records it in an AI-powered notepad, and when it’s time to sit down to write, he asks for a character description based on all the notes he recorded. This way, AI becomes a tool, not a threat, since “it also helps edit texts, and it’s useful for dramaturgy work. With Custom GPT, you can pre-set a chat and ask it to play the role of a character, to confirm or deny if the character would act a certain way. The work with full scripts or very long texts is still limited.”
These models still lack memory, so “each time we write to them, they forget we exist,” and they are still “a bit useless for working on large works. I recommend trying Cloud, Canvas GPT, and other tools. But it's still not ready to write a good movie. Prompting is giving instructions to the machine. To imagine the space where the transhuman lives in my movie, I imagined cubes and an ocean and started prompting. It doesn’t work. They understand the language, but not us yet. It’s very hard to prompt images: it requires a lot of thinking and creativity to describe what you have in your head, which is what we, as filmmakers, do.”
These tools are still in development, so they don’t yet provide definitive solutions for a creator’s needs. Behl also emphasized how he uses the tool to create Runway videos. “In Eleven Labs, I can choose a voice and act with that voice. It’s like directing actors. A pre-set, purchased, or any kind of voice. Then, I used Suno, which makes songs, and generated this video. We can generate very high-quality images. But the video creators like Runway, Clin, and Suno still destroy the image a bit and remove details. But there’s still more imperfection in video creators. I think they need a year to reach the level that fixed image creation has today.”
When considering these technologies and author’s rights, the filmmaker focused on the so-called “black box.” “Why is it called a black box? It’s called that by the companies that train the models because even they don’t know what the results will be. After training, a larger team works on analyzing what the AI did. The input is datasets: a set of data that is prepared to be given to the model. It’s important for author’s rights societies to understand the concept of a dataset. The dataset consists of texts, images, videos, or songs that are prepared, almost always in a dual form, to train the AI. The dataset issue is complex today because very few models and companies publish the datasets they use.”
Imágenes generadas con Letz.ia
Redefining the Concept of a Work
Christoph Behl is more in favor of certifying than prohibiting and directs his gaze to new generations and new productions emerging on the Internet. “Fiction, to this day, exists in theater, books, writing (few kids write), or in cinema, television, and platforms (which is an expensive world). But imagine millions of young people who, with few resources, can tell fictional stories. It will happen in a few years. Millions of contents. The internet will be turned upside down because internet content is mostly documentary. Youtubers, tiktokers are like the documentarians of the '60s, they create content on the street. The new ones will make fiction about their world, which is a digital world. Millions of young people will start telling stories about the worlds they live in, many of which have author’s rights, intellectual property, and trademarks,” he explained.
Faced with such a complex and powerful scenario, Behl is convinced that “the worst thing that can happen to us is that these young people end up in gray areas, and the owners (not the author’s rights holders, but the intellectual property or brand owners) will start commercializing this content without recognizing these authors.”
In this sense, he proposed: “What I want to ask is that we incorporate that generation. They will be new authors; let’s not be afraid of them. In recent years, societies have expelled a lot of Uber or Rappi workers, who aren’t unionized. There’s been a constant expulsion of people from the system. I ask you to understand and incorporate these authors, understand the tools, understand what is a work and what isn’t; it will need to be redefined. I think prohibiting is useless; it’s too big a wave, and it’s impossible. (…) I believe that the proliferation of this will revalue human work, and we will seek human authors, but we need to figure out how to certify humanity. Let’s not try to prohibit the non-human, let’s try to certify the human.”
AI as an Ally: Tool or Threat?
As part of the AVACI Congress, a roundtable discussion titled "Professional Meeting of Directors and Screenwriters: Developing the Profession in the Age of Digital Platforms and AI" brought together prominent audiovisual professionals to reflect on the challenges and opportunities artificial intelligence presents to cinema.
Moderated by Danilo Serbedzija (DHFA), the discussion covered both philosophical and practical aspects of using AI in filmmaking. Bruno Oliviero (guest director) reflected on how technology can optimize costs and processes but cautioned against excessive reliance on it. Director Ada Johnson (guest) shared her experience creating a short documentary partially developed with AI, highlighting the technical and creative challenges of working with a still-evolving tool.
Both Christoph Behl and Bruno Oliviero agreed that AI, far from replacing creators, can be a powerful tool if consciously integrated while respecting local cultural realities.
Meanwhile, Irene von Alberti (guest director) emphasized that "filmmaking remains a deeply human art, where AI can assist but cannot replace the director's sensitivity."
Christoph Behl added that AI has the potential to drive waves of innovation, especially in contexts with limited resources, while Irene von Alberti highlighted the value of human intuition in directing, comparing it to the work of a conductor.
Finally, Ada Johnson invited attendees to explore her work, offering a link to her film as an example of the dialogue between human creativity and artificial intelligence.
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