At this year’s Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, Polish-American filmmaker and producer Matt Szymanowski offered an expansive, global view of what he calls the “new paradigm” of AI-assisted cinema. In the talk, moderated by Kristen Davis, he didn’t position AI as a marginal tool, but as a force intertwined with one of “the largest shifts in humanity that’s ever happened.”

Szymanowski — a Sundance Lab finalist, Berlinale Talents alumnus and founder of the AI-focused studio Bear & Bot — is currently juggling two ambitious projects: Captive Mind, a dystopian hybrid feature now in post-production, and A Human Future, a global documentary exploring the social, cultural and psychological dimensions of AI across California, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His Tallinn talk drew extensively on this ongoing research.

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Szymanowski explained that, before discussing technology, he felt compelled to understand the broader transformation underway. Over the past 18 months, he’s travelled from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Salzburg, Tel Aviv, Dubai and Amsterdam, interviewing artists featured at events such as the Amsterdam AI Film Festival. What interests him isn’t simply the arrival of new tools, but the way they “reflect back on us.”

When people talk about AI, he suggested, “you kind of talk about yourself.” In his view, the debate on AI cinema is ultimately about what we value in creativity, authorship and human expression.

Despite his background — trained at the National Polish Film School and long active in Los Angeles advertising and on film sets — Szymanowski insists that he embraces AI because every major artistic shift has followed a similar pattern. He compared today’s debates with the turmoil caused by the introduction of photography, sound cinema or CGI.

Each disruption initially triggered fear, job losses and heated moral arguments, he recalled. But history shows that technology moves forward “without morality or bias” — and creators either adapt or are left behind.

Szymanowski described how AI is reshaping the production pipeline of Captive Mind, shot over 13 days in Los Angeles and now integrating AI for 30–40% of its final imagery. In his opinion, the hybrid workflow brings three key advantages: efficiency, sustainability and creative opportunity.

Where a traditional VFX task might require five to seven days, tests carried out by his team showed that an equivalent AI-driven process could be completed in three, involving fewer people and significantly lower costs. Across the entire feature — with around 300 VFX shots — he expects savings of 25% to 50% in both budget and time.

But the biggest structural change, he argued, is the shift from a linear production chain to a circular version. In this new model, filmmakers move fluidly between conception, world-building, AI casting, hybrid production and AI-assisted post-production, looping back and reiterating whenever needed. It’s a process he describes as “chaotic, dynamic and entirely of the future.”

Moreover, Szymanowski identified three main ways in which AI is currently entering film practice: AI as a VFX supplement (accelerating workflows and reducing labour intensity); AI for world-building, (enabling directors to create whole environments or generate archival-style footage), and character augmentation (through face-swapping, synthetic performers or fully AI-generated characters).

He demonstrated differences between various prompting strategies, noting that emotional specificity, intention and detail dramatically impact results. “The more you put in, the more you get out,” he remarked.

While optimistic, Szymanowski acknowledged significant legal uncertainty. Clearances depend on close engagement with distributors, broadcasters and toolmakers, and the ethical discomfort around data scraping still divides the industry. But he insisted that workable legal frameworks are emerging and that production teams are increasingly collaborating with specialised lawyers.

Fragmentation is another challenge, with dozens of tools and workflows scattered across cloud-based and local systems. The producer of the near future, he argued, must think “like a systems architect,” integrating software, human talent and evolving best practices into a coherent production environment.

For all his enthusiasm, Szymanowski repeatedly stressed that AI does not reduce the need for storytelling rigour. “AI is not about shortcuts,” he cautioned. Faster iteration does not replace emotional truth or narrative craft. Instead, the potential lies in building new cinematic worlds and enabling filmmakers — especially independents — to work at scales previously out of reach.

He closed by reframing AI cinema not as a threat, but as a catalyst for rediscovering what makes filmmaking meaningful. In his opinion, AI ultimately widens the field of possibility: a chance to rethink workflows, experiment with hybrid creative logics and craft stories which resonate more deeply with audiences.

And if the idea of “text-to-film” still feels like science fiction, Szymanowski noted that, for better or worse, someone in the field is already describing the future as one where “the machine will direct the film and you will direct the machine.”