Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every aspect of cinema from production to distribution and audience engagement. But it is not without its challenges, particularly in the case of documentary film which relies on values of truth, authenticity and facts.

While artistic creativity and selection are key to documentary representation, recent releases such as About a Hero (2024), Another Body (2023), Welcome to Chechnya (2020), Roadrunner (2021) highlight the ethical dilemmas AI introduces, including its environmental impact.

In adjacent fields of narrative cinema and video games, AI is already transforming reality into imaginative screen worlds. Games like Block Party create human avatar Non-Player Characters based on real documentary subjects. In documentary, AI is entangled with processes, from research – summarising online content using ChatGPT, digging into archives, transcription and translation of interviews, to creative functions such as filling gaps in footage and the editing of short visual sequences that bypass human editors.

The use of AI tools to, for instance, streamline, enhance, improve, clean, and organise documentary materials and processes continues, but it is the generative aspects of AI that cause ethical concerns. For one, researchers have noted the presence of real-world stereotypes and social biases in Large Language........

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