Why this filmmaker is crucial to the AI conversation
His point: "moral reservations" won't stop AI's ability to redefine or even destroy an industry
A recent Free Press piece by Ryan Hassan titled “The Filmmaker Using AI to Beat Hollywood“ makes plain what many still prefer not to admit: some of the most enthusiastic promoters of AI are not merely trying to improve creative work, but to blow up the old limits altogether.
In the article, filmmaker Charlie Curran celebrates AI precisely because it lets him produce fast, cheap, culturally reactive films at a speed Hollywood cannot match. He sees the collapse of the old system not as a tragedy, but as liberation: fewer costs, fewer gatekeepers, more output, more disruption.
That is exactly the spirit of technological maximalism now gaining ground: the conviction that if something can be accelerated, scaled, and democratized by AI, then it should be.
There is a real insight buried in that enthusiasm. AI may indeed lower barriers, widen access, and make room for creators who were once locked out by money, networks, and institutional control. But the moral problem goes deeper than the standard warning that we may be adopting a powerful technology too quickly.
The deeper problem is that speed itself is becoming a criterion of value, and efficiency is being mistaken for creativity. Once that happens, the question is no longer simply whether jobs will be lost, but whether human making itself will be redefined according to the logic of immediacy, scale, and endless production.
A Catholic response has to go beyond cautionary slogans. It must insist that creativity is not sacred merely because it is novel, nor human merely because a human prompted it. Art is bound up with discipline, patience, embodiment, apprenticeship, sacrifice, and a real encounter with reality. If AI becomes a tool that serves those things, it may have a legitimate place. But if it trains us to prize instant generation over craftsmanship, reaction over contemplation, and volume over depth, then it will not just disrupt creative industries. It will deform the human soul that creates.
So the real argument is not only that AI can move too fast. It is that a civilization can begin to love the wrong things in the name of innovation. And once that happens, warnings about “perils” are not enough. What is needed is a stronger account of what human creativity is for, and why no technological revolution, however dazzling, should be allowed to define that on its own.