August 22, 2025 06:50 AM IST First published on: Aug 22, 2025 at 06:50 AM ISTShareA month after controversy broke out over the news that the Tamil-dubbed version of the 2013 Hindi film Raanjhanaa, titled Ambikapathy, was being re-released with a new AI-generated ending, the announcement of a new film, Chiranjeevi Hanuman — The Eternal, made using AI, has sharpened fears over what the technology could mean for one of India’s biggest creative industries. While the use of the new technology in the two films may vary in terms of scale — from a single scene in Ambikapathy to the entire project in Chiranjeevi Hanuman — it raises equally uncomfortable questions about creative ownership, money and power. “And so it begins…who…needs writers and directors when it’s ‘Made in AI’”, posted filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane on social media, with director Anurag Kashyap, too, questioning the wisdom of supporting projects made with technology that could ultimately make the people involved in filmmaking redundant. Their unease underscores the crux of the matter: In a time when prompts fed into a machine are all one needs to make a movie, what happens to those whose livelihood depends on the collaborative, time-consuming process that is cinema?Yet, as Kashyap himself pointed out, there is no wishing away the technology itself. Nearly three years after the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with reactions that swung between a sense of awe over its capabilities and paranoia about a Terminator-like takeover by machines, attitudes have settled in favour of general acceptance. For many, including artists, writers and other creative professionals, it has become one more thread in the fabric of routine, both at home and in the workplace. But apprehensions persist, including over ethical use: In the case of Ambikapathy, for example, the producers were accused of using AI to undermine the creative vision behind the original. The central question, then, is this: At what point does AI go from being a tool — such as in the 2024 film The Brutalist, where it was used to enhance the Hungarian accent of certain characters — to a competitor, as appears to be the case with Chiranjeevi Hanuman and other AI-created films like Maharaja in Denims and Naisha?AdvertisementThis is an issue that film industries elsewhere, too, have been grappling with; the use of AI was, notably, a flashpoint in the nearly year-long strike by writers and actors in Hollywood in 2023. In that case, negotiations between industry stakeholders led to the creation of guardrails in how the technology could be used without pitting artists against machines. As Indian cinema swings between excitement and apprehension over a future with AI, this is the conversation that must now take place.