Ethan Mollick: AI film is getting genuinely interesting, and 'is it art?' is the wrong question
emollick · x · 2026-09-19
Ethan Mollick observes that genuinely interesting AI-created films are starting to emerge amid a flood of slop, a trend he expects to accelerate — and the "is it art?" debate will grow with it.
He points to Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which argued that this is the wrong question: what matters is how art's function and status change under new reproduction technologies.
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