None of this means a story has to be slow or self-consciously clever. Some of the most philosophical stories I know are thrillers, horror films, fairy tales, comedies. They work because the philosophy is alive inside the situation — felt through danger, desire, guilt, absurdity — rather than announced from above.
A good story never needs to mention Kierkegaard or Camus or Arendt. But those thinkers are useful to me anyway, because they give names to the pressures stories are already applying. That's all I'm doing in this piece: borrowing their language to describe what I'm trying to make.
Technology as Pressure, Not Subject
The storytelling I'm drawn to doesn't treat technology as the subject. The subject is what technology does to people.
This is the thing I admire most in Ted Chiang. His stories tend to open with some enormous technical or metaphysical idea, and then they become powerful by staying stubbornly close to the human consequence — grief, usually, or faith, or regret. The idea is the engine; it's never the destination.
That's how I think about AI filmmaking too. The tools are fascinating, but the tool is not the story. The story is what happens when a person is handed a new kind of power, or a new way to remember, perform, hide, or be seen.
Technology creates pressure. The story is what the pressure reveals.
Anxiety and Freedom
Kierkegaard called anxiety "the dizziness of freedom," which I think is one of the best notes on character ever written. Anxiety isn't only the fear that something bad will happen. It can be the terror of possibility — the moment a character realises they can act. They can leave. They can confess. They can become someone else. Freedom sounds beautiful in the abstract; in drama it's usually frightening, because it removes the excuses and leaves the character alone with themselves.
This is why a character standing at a threshold is almost always interesting. The person who could walk out the door and doesn't. The person who gets exactly what they wanted and is suddenly afraid of it.
Interactive storytelling makes this strange and new, because choice can become part of the form itself. The viewer isn't just watching someone else decide — they're implicated. Their choices reveal their own curiosity, cowardice, care. The story gets to ask: what did you do when the system gave you power?
The Absurd
"We must imagine Sisyphus happy."
— Camus
That line feels uncomfortably close to modern life. So much contemporary story is about people trapped in loops — work loops, family loops, algorithmic loops — pushing the boulder up knowing it will roll back down. The obvious story is escape. The more interesting story, often, is attitude. What does a person do when the universe declines to hand them meaning? Despair, rebel, laugh? Keep going out of spite, or habit, or some stubborn private joy?
The office worker who knows the rituals are absurd and performs them anyway. The artist making work inside conditions that seem hostile to art. The person who knows the game is rigged and plays beautifully regardless.
I've lived a small, stupid version of this myself: the regeneration loop. One more try. One more seed. I've lost whole days to that particular boulder, and the version I finally used was rarely better than the one I had at hour one. At some point you either despair or you laugh and impose a rule — if the beat lands, the shot is done — which I suppose is my own way of imagining Sisyphus happy.
AI can also visualise absurdity in ways film hasn't really had access to before. Loops that mutate. A scene that returns again and again, each time slightly stranger, funnier, more painful. Repetition that's alive.
Becoming Who You Are
"Become who you are" — Nietzsche — is one of the great story shapes, and it's worth noticing it doesn't say improve. A character becoming more fully themselves can be heroic or monstrous. The shy person becomes brave; the obedient person becomes free; the charming person becomes hollow. Sometimes becoming who you are means losing the mask. Sometimes it means admitting a terrible desire.
AI makes identity stranger still. Avatars, voice models, digital doubles, generated performances — old questions in new bodies. Which version of a person is real? Can a generated image reveal something a photograph hides? What happens to "become who you are" when the image of the self is endlessly editable?
This isn't abstract for me. Anyone who has made films with generative tools knows the problem of drift: characters who subtly stop looking like themselves from scene to scene, a face that erodes a little with every generation. I've learned to lock a character's identity completely before generating a single frame, because in a medium where everything morphs, the self has to be fixed deliberately or it dissolves. As a metaphor it's almost too on-the-nose.
I don't have an answer to the editable self. I suspect the answer is a film.
Choice and Responsibility
Sartre's idea that we are our choices is the simplest, most brutal tool in the kit. A character can claim anything about who they are; the story tests them with a choice. Not a preference — a choice with a cost. Choice cuts through self-description. The brave one runs. The cynic acts with unexpected tenderness.
Interactive stories make this literal, but most of them fall into a trap: they treat choice as content navigation. Door A or door B, ending one or ending two. Philosophically, a choice only matters if it leaves a mark.
What I keep imagining is an interactive story that remembers not just what the viewer chose but what kind of chooser they became. Did they seek control? Avoid responsibility? Protect the vulnerable, or treat the characters as objects? Did they keep rewriting the world and refusing to accept the consequences?
That's where interactivity stops being a gimmick and becomes moral texture.
Power and Resistance
"Where there is power, there is resistance."
— Foucault
Modern stories are rarely about one villain doing bad things. Power is distributed through systems — platforms, institutions, interfaces, habits, language. Power decides what counts as normal, who gets seen, who has to explain themselves, which stories are easy to tell and which are nearly impossible.
And resistance isn't always a grand rebellion. It can be small, private, funny, compromised. Refusing the role you were assigned. Misusing a tool in a way its makers didn't intend. Remaining strange in a world that rewards smoothness.
This matters for AI specifically, because these tools are not neutral magic boxes. They carry assumptions about taste, beauty, bodies, usefulness, ownership. I notice it every time I write for generation: the machine doesn't read subtext, and given any ambiguity it will reliably find the least interesting interpretation — which is another way of saying it has a default aesthetic, and the default is always pulling. A filmmaker using AI is negotiating with a system of power whether they know it or not. Sometimes I negotiate by writing emotional and visual intent explicitly into the script, leaving the machine nowhere to hide. Sometimes, when a workflow won't give me enough control, I end up building my own tool instead — which is its own small act of resistance: extending the system rather than accepting its terms.
I suspect this is becoming a question for the people who make the tools, too. The most useful creative tools won't be the ones that pretend to be neutral; they'll be opinionated in ways their makers are honest about, and they'll leave room for the filmmaker to push back. Either way, the negotiation can become part of the story rather than a problem hidden underneath it.
Kafka and the System That Needs You
"A cage went in search of a bird."
— Kafka
I find this one of the most unsettling images in literature because it reverses the usual idea of entrapment. The cage is active. It wants someone. It needs a prisoner to complete it.
It feels very modern. Forms looking for applicants. Platforms looking for users. Algorithms looking for behaviour. Kafka makes systems feel alive without making them human, and that's the horror — nobody has to hate you. The machinery continues anyway.
AI can express this beautifully and terribly. A world that rearranges itself around the character. Bureaucracy as weather. A frame that traps its subject — an image searching for a person to complete it. The system doesn't merely contain the character; it recognises them, misrecognises them, sorts them, renders them, replaces them.
Arendt and the Failure to Decide
Hannah Arendt wrote that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil, and I think this might be the most important idea here for anyone writing now. It moves evil away from theatrical villainy and towards ordinary failure.
The frightening character isn't always the monster. Sometimes it's the person who follows procedure. Who protects their career. Who says it's not their department. Most harm happens through drift — obedience, convenience, the desire to avoid discomfort. A story shaped by this idea doesn't need a villain speech. It needs a room full of people not quite objecting.
AI sharpens the question, because when decisions are spread across tools, datasets, policies and user behaviour, responsibility blurs. Everyone gets to claim they were only a small part of the process. Story can make that blur visible. That might be one of the most useful things story can do right now.
Beauvoir and Shared Freedom
"To will oneself free is also to will others free."
— Simone de Beauvoir
Most stories treat freedom as individual escape — one person gets out, one person becomes themselves. Beauvoir makes freedom relational, and the question gets uncomfortable fast. What if your freedom depends on someone else staying trapped? Is the character becoming free, or just becoming powerful? Do they want liberation, or exemption?
This sits right at the centre of stories about technology. AI gives a single creator extraordinary capacity, and at the same time raises hard questions about labour, consent, authorship, who gets access and who gets used as raw material. The interesting story doesn't preach about any of this. It just puts a character inside the contradiction and lets them act.
Desire and Self-Betrayal
There's a line Žižek uses, out of Lacan: the only thing one can really be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire.
A person can betray themselves long before they betray anyone else. They compromise. They become sensible. They accept the smaller life and call it maturity, or realism, or kindness — and sometimes it is those things, and sometimes it's fear wearing respectable clothes.
Desire here doesn't mean wanting something nice. Desire is frightening because it tells the truth: it points at the work, the person, the risk, the transformation the character can't quite explain away. A story about desire asks what this person actually wants, what they've built to avoid knowing it, and what it would cost them to stop lying.
I'll admit AI filmmaking is full of exactly this tension for me. Pulled towards the tools and repelled by them at the same time. Wanting the impossible image; worrying what wanting it says about craft, labour, taste. I don't think that tension is a problem to solve. I think it's part of the drama of the moment, and probably material.
Form Should Think Too
Here's what genuinely excites me about AI and interactive video: these ideas don't have to stay buried under the story. The form itself can respond.
A story about anxiety doesn't need to show an anxious character — the image can become unstable, the edit can hesitate, the camera can reveal too many possible paths, until the viewer feels the dizziness of freedom in their own hands. A story about power doesn't need a speech about institutions; the interface can constrain the viewer, reward compliance, punish deviation. A story about guilt doesn't need a confession scene if the world remembers what the viewer did — a face returns, a sound recurs, a small choice echoes later in a shape the viewer never expected.
In my own work, the version of this I keep returning to is the relationship between a locked structure and a breathing surface. I anchor each scene to a single definitive frame — lighting, tone, the reality of the space — and then let texture and atmosphere shift around it, because this medium is inherently unstable and sometimes the instability is the most beautiful thing in the shot. The narrative stays fixed; the surface stays alive. I used to treat that as a compromise. It's starting to feel more like the native grammar of the form.
Branching choices that reveal character. Unstable images for fractured identity. Worlds with memory that make responsibility visible. Viewers who are implicated rather than passive.
This is where I think the medium gets genuinely exciting — not making normal films faster, not just lowering costs (though that matters), but new relationships between story, viewer, image and choice.
New Ways to Tell Stories
The future of AI filmmaking, for me, is mostly about new ways to tell stories.
Some of that is spectacle, and I won't pretend spectacle doesn't thrill me — impossible camera moves, dream logic, worlds no individual could have built a few years ago. But the deeper opportunity is structural and emotional. These tools might let stories become more responsive, unstable, personal, alive — works that sit somewhere between film, game, installation, dream and memory.
A new tool doesn't automatically create a new art form. What it does is make certain questions newly available. What does freedom feel like when the viewer has to choose? What does guilt feel like when the world remembers?
The thing I most want to build sits inside those questions — the story I described earlier, the one that remembers not just what the viewer chose but what kind of chooser they became, and quietly reshapes its world around that knowledge. Not a scoring system. A mirror.
I don't entirely know how to make it yet. That's most of the appeal.
And that's why I keep coming back to philosophy — not to dress stories up in theory, but because philosophy gives language to the pressures that make stories matter in the first place: freedom, guilt, desire, power, identity, and the difficult work of becoming a person.
The best stories don't ask what happens next. They ask what this reveals about being alive.