🎬 AI in Film, Photography and Social Media

AI is rapidly changing the meaning of photography, film and social media content. Images can now be generated or substantially altered through ordinary language, still photographs can become moving performances, and increasingly realistic video can be created without a traditional camera shoot. These developments are reducing production barriers while challenging long established assumptions about authorship, authenticity and visual evidence.

This course examines the changing relationship between recorded and synthetic media. It considers AI image generation, photographic enhancement and reconstruction, image animation, text to video production, synthetic actors and voices, automated social media content, virtual influencers and the increasing convergence of image, video and audio systems.

The course also confronts the less comfortable consequences of this transformation. AI can invent details within restored photographs, reshape personal and historical memory, reproduce someone’s appearance or voice without meaningful consent and create convincing evidence of events that never occurred. Copyright, digital replicas, deepfakes, disclosure, provenance and the growing difficulty of establishing what is authentic are examined alongside the creative possibilities.

Because visual AI is developing exceptionally quickly, emerging capabilities, legal changes, platform policies and industry developments remain constantly on our radar. The course is reviewed regularly so that it continues to reflect how AI is actually changing photography, film production and social media rather than how those fields were expected to change at one fixed point in time.