A Filipino man walks through the backyard of his childhood home in rural Hawai’i, his footsteps swooshing through the grass. Birds chirp, contributing to the tropical din, as he approaches a shrine at the base of a starfruit tree. He bends to inspect a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman, her hair in a 1950s side part. Suddenly, a gust of wind shakes the tree’s branches, knocking over the contents of the shrine. The man steps back, trips on a root, and hits his head. When he awakens, he’s in a dark, misty forest, a woman wearing a clay mask standing over him, brandishing a sword. “Who are you who dares to sleep under the sacred tree?” she asks in Ilocano, a Philippine language widely spoken in Hawaii’s Filipino community, while holding the sword at his throat. He replies that he’s lost and turns to flee. She chases, alternating between running and floating through the air. He falls again. She advances, sword held high. He throws a rock at her, shattering the clay mask and revealing half her face. “Mom?” he asks. This is the opening of “Murmuray,” a short film by independent filmmaker Brad Tangonan. Everything about this film felt like his previous work, from the tactile nature shots to the dreamlike desaturated highlights. The only difference? He made it using AI. Tangonan was one of 10 filmmakers to participate in Google Flow Sessions, a five-week cohort that gave creatives access to Google’s suite of AI tools to produce short films, including Gemini, image generator Nano Banana Pro, and film generator Veo. Techcrunch event Boston, MA | June 9, 2026 Each film differed in scope. Hal Watmough’s “You’ve Been Here Before” blended hyperreal, lifelike visuals with cartoonish stylization to playfully explore the importance of a morning routine, while Tabitha Swanson’s “The Antidote to Fear is Curiosity” is a more esoteric, philosophical conversation about our relationship with AI and ourselves. None of these short films, which were screened at Soho House New York late last year, felt like AI slop. Each independent filmmaker I spoke to said that, in the case of these films, AI had enabled them to tell a story they otherwise wouldn’t have had the budget or time to tell. “I see all of these tools, whether it be a camera you can pick up or generative AI, as ways for an artist to express what they have in their mind,” Tangonan told me after the screenings. This AI-is-just-another-tool-for-creators argument is certainly the message Google is trying to underscore. Google isn’t wrong; AI will increasingly be part of a creator’s toolkit as video generation products improve. In 2025, companies like Google, Runway, OpenAI, Kling, Luma AI, and Higgsfield progressed far beyond the uncanny, prompt-based novelties of the year prior. The AI video industry, with billions in venture capital dollars in tow, is now moving from prototype to post-production. This era of AI abundance that has provided tools to “democratize access” to the film industry also threatens to erase jobs and creativity, smothering them under an avalanche of low-effort slop. The existential stakes have pitted creatives against one another. Those who engage with AI risk being labeled as complicit; those who don’t risk becoming obsolete. The question isn’t whether the tools belong in the toolkit — they’re coming, whether we like it or not. Instead it is: What kind of filmmaking survives when the industry pushes for speed and scale over quality? And what happens when individual artists use the same tools to make something that actually matters? But is it slop? Filmmaker Keenan MacWilliam used AI to animate scans of plants and fish in her short film “Mimesis”Image Credits:Keenan MacWilliam The arguments against AI in filmmaking are plentiful — and from some of the highest-profile names in the industry. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said last October that he would rather die than use generative AI to make a film. James Cameron said in a recent CBS interview the idea of generating actors and emotions with prompts is “horrifying,” and that generative AI is only capable of spitting out a blended average of everything that’s ever been done by humans before. Werner Herzog said the films he’s seen created by AI “have no soul.” He added: “The common denominator, and nothing beyond this common denominator, can be found in these fabrications.” Cameron and Herzog’s thesis is that AI is taking the wheel of creation out of the hands of humans and couldn’t possibly be used to create a representation of their own lived experiences. “It’s very easy to be angry with AI as a concept in the machine, but it’s harder to be angry with someone that’s made something personal,” Watmough told TechCrunch. Tangonan, who describes “Murmuray” as a “family story,” agrees wi