Wildscreen’s Science in Storytelling event this March opened with the “Artificial Intelligence: An Altruist’s Guide” panel. Given the heated conversations taking place in production houses across Bristol, and beyond, there was nowhere else to start.
Bristol is famously celebrated as “Green Hollywood”, being home to a number of production companies, the Wildscreen Festival and, of course, our MSc in Science Communication here at UWE Bristol. The industry has been pondering the impact of AI in the world of wildlife film after something of a bombshell panel (AI Won’t Take Your Job, But the Person That Can Use It Better Than You Will…) at last year’s Festival.
The full Wildscreen Festival took place in Bristol in October 2024, a weeklong event for the wildlife film industry with delegates from across the globe. Midway through the week, Eline Van der Velden, founder and CEO of UK-based production company Particle6, and Christopher Paetkau, senior MD of Canada’s Build Films, formed part of a panel on AI and it became clear from their comments that you could be forgiven for thinking that AI had very much arrived in the industry, with all the subtlety of a bear in a production office, and was about to make lots of jobs obsolete.
Van der Velden announced, “Pre-production, ideas, budgets, scripting, it can do everything for you,” she said, “then cameras, you don’t need operators anymore because it will do it all for you.” Cue an audible gasp from the room. “You may laugh, but I’m telling you. Everything is done for you. You wouldn’t send a camera in a helicopter anymore would you? You’d use a drone. This is the same.”
Paetkau quipped, “that’s a good thing.” and was, if anything, even more dismissive of the prospects for voice over artists.
In a room full of filmmakers, the reaction was as you might imagine. As a lecturer leading two modules in this area, Wildlife Filmmaking and Science On Air and On Screen, I felt more than a little uneasy sitting there alongside many of our students. More than anything else, I feared for the real, authentic films we’ve made and loved. From the stage, someone called for “a new kind of authenticity” in the new world brought to us by AI. Behind me, a voice shouted “Fake News”. It was clear I was not alone in my discomfort.
MSc Science Communication students filming on location and using the editing suite at Films@59
A member of the audience raised a hand, “I think authenticity matters. Here’s a thought. If your wife had just punched in the (AI) chat five minutes before your wedding. ‘Write me some wedding vows’. And she read them out and they sounded beautiful…does that matter to you? Or do you want her to write her wedding vows and say something meaningful?”
As has already been reported, Paetkau replied that he had used AI to compose his wife’s Christmas card and he felt that that was “completely authentic”. People laughed, perhaps a little nervously.
After the panel, conversations all either began or ended with an expectant “Did you see the AI panel?” In the weeks since the Festival, colleagues and friends in the industry often returned to the conversation. In our sessions on campus with the MSc students, we had to work hard not to allow discussions of AI in filmmaking to derail the rest of our learning.
On another panel at the festival in October 2024, Keith Scholey, co-director of Silverback (Our Planet, Our Oceans) was asked about the impact of AI, sharing “The big challenge for natural history will be what is real and how you put a value on reality. You could very quickly see cheap AI content just flooding the market, and we have to consider how you persuade the world to pay for the world of reality.”
Whilst Walter Kohler, founder and chief executive of Terra Mater Studios agreed, stating that “AI is the biggest problem we have in the room. You are used to seeing an image and believing it is real. This will be a big disturbance to our mind if we’re sitting there asking if it’s real or not.”
Personally, I cannot imagine a time when I reach for the remote and think that I really want to watch something generated by AI. Sir David Attenborough has been the face and voice of Natural History film in the UK for some time. It’s not his face and his voice which make him quite so iconic. It’s his insight. The world is full of faces, voices and opinions. Insight is valuable.
Returning to last year’s Festival, Paetkau showed a sequence of a polar bear, several aspects of which were enhanced or generated using AI, explaining “we spent under 24 hours there filming this and got footage that we wanted to put into a sequence. We went to the BBC’s Planet Earth, we took a script from a lion hunt, copy and pasted into ChatGPT and altered it to the behaviour we described. Then we got ElevenLabs to produce a voiceover. From the day of filming to putting that together was two days.”
The sequence looked good. It was well edited. The script was fine but the voice over delivery felt, at least to me, like it belonged somewhere on the edge of the uncanny valley. To others in the room, it felt real enough to become a shockwave.
My expectations were then high for the most recent event. The panel in Wildscreen’s Science In Storytelling panel in March 2025 was intriguingly titled, calling for a human focused outlook: “An Altruist’s Guide”. With the AI panel in October 2024 derailing conversations midway through the Festival, the organiser programmed this panel to open the day. Perhaps with one eye on keeping things light(er), it opened with PhD student Prem Gill who is studying seals from satellite data and using AI in his work, conducting a quiz with the audience deciding whether a sound was a “seal” or “space”. Unfortunately, a series of mishaps with the sound meant that it fell a little flat. Prem, however, is an entertaining presenter and as the technology failed, his warm and dry humour made the best of the situation.
There’s no doubt that AI is a tool and can be a useful one. That it can be used in conservation efforts like PhD research is, perhaps, slightly tangential to whether it should be used in wildlife filmmaking. Heading into the panel in March, I was instead wondering how we should use this tool in our stories and what stories might they enable us to tell. Perhaps, more importantly, how honest are we prepared to be about how we use AI tools (if we do at all) in our creative work?
We are used to filmmakers using Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). Some of it considerably better than others. For CGI, Animators and VFX artists manually design and animate scenes or characters. For AI, a person (not described as an artist) types prompts and the AI does the rest. Proponents for AI often suggest that it will reduce the more mundane parts of our jobs and free us up to be more creative. 62% of users in a recent report into AI’s use in media said their biggest use was “Content Creation”. I am interested to know what the more creative parts are of media than content creation but, joking apart, it’s a lovely thought that we might altruistically use AI to make the world a better, more diverse place filled with creativity. I suspect people might, all too often, take shortcuts where they are available.
If we do use AI to create our films, write our articles and tell our stories then what are we freeing ourselves up for? It seems unlikely that many people will look back at their lives and wish they had fewer moments making beautiful things, really getting to the heart of a story and finding ways to enthral audiences. Whether they will wish they spent more time typing prompts into generative AI remains to be seen.
In an adjacent discussion in the world of filmmaking, we are constantly being told that our attention spans are shrinking, although the evidence for that is scant, to say the least. There is evidence that filmmakers believe it and tell audiences that it is true but it does not necessarily follow that people’s propensity to concentrate is diminishing. Oppenheimer, The Brutalist and, to a certain extent, Adolescence tell a different story about audiences and their attention spans. If you want to make long form pieces, you can find the audiences and research to back it up. If you want to make short, snappy social media style films, there’s research to back that up too. Let’s not pretend the audience are all one homogenous group.
I suspect that some filmmakers will use the tools of AI extensively. Some audiences will lap it up. Other filmmakers will strive for a more standard meaning of the word “authentic” and, doubtless, open their films with a badge that declares that AI was not used in the making thereof. Other audiences will seek that content out the way a select band of teenagers are heading to record fairs, hunting for vinyl. Personally, I hope our stories will continue to be rich, deep and authentically told. Perhaps the AI could help with the risk assessments?
By Andrew Glester, Lecturer in Science Communication, MSc Science Communication, UWE Bristol.