> In the case of Aliens, James Cameron is explicitly saying he just went with Kodak film that was available at the time, which everyone was using.

Ok, fair. James Cameron can do whatever he wants with his films. They are his artistic output, and if he feels the technology available at the time didn't properly communicate that, he can certainly work to mitigate that however he wants. I assure you, this is not common among directors. If you invited Ridley Scott and Derek Vanlint to a meeting informing them that Alien was being re-released as an AI "enhanced" movie, I sure as fuck wouldn't want to be in that room.

> I will submit that directors are not generally the right people to call the shots here. A director can never watch his own movie the way the audience does.

Ha. I'm a Tech Artist and do VFX, so I have more visibility than most into how a lot of these decisions get made. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but of all the confidently incorrect declarations about art I've seen in tech fora, this has got to be in the top 5.

To some extent, the misconception is understandable from a consumer vantage point: without spending a lot of time creating images from nothing to have a specific impact on the viewer, you really don't understand how many decisions there are to make about minutiae, and how much it all affects how the work hits. Prompt-based AI image generators are a good example of this. Their making these decisions is the real boon for non-artists that want to make images, and also why they're non-starters for high-level professional deliverable work. Learning to use art tools to produce clean images is the easy part. The hard part is deciding at an extremely granular level what those images should contain. Since the models amalgamate those decisions from the millions of decisions that artists have already made in different images, that lets end users indefinitely create visually compelling images without having to know why they're compelling at a granular level. But the decisions at that granular level communicate a lot to the viewer, and even with the finer-grained control you can get with prompt manipulation, control nets, inpainting, loras, etc. it's still bumper cars vs driving. Famous artists are usually famous because their vision isn't just a mix of what other people have done before them-- it's got other frameworks, stimuli, references, connections and influences that are implemented in novel, complex, and very specific ways. Fighting against the amalgamated decisions of every artist that contributed to the model to achieve those results requires so much more effort than just making it from scratch. That's why generative AI in industry tools like Nuke don't integrate prompts or generate direct visuals-- they do things like make masks for compositing. A huge win, but 100% not creating images that go on screen. On a much more extreme level, Disney could not have trained a model with the entirety of early animation and pre-1937 non-animated visual art-- even their own films-- and come up with The Old Mill, no matter how much engineering they did.

In a film, almost all of those decisions made by an AI model when generating images are made, or at least finalized, by the director, often in conjunction with the DP and Production Designer. Most of them are obsessed with things like the slope and toe of film, grain, minute differences in very specific color representations, etc. etc. etc. and it affects nearly everything about the film-- set decisions, framing to get more or less of something, what time of day to shoot at, lighting, grading, etc. etc. etc. Saying directors shouldn't have complete control over the medium on which their movies are captured betrays a complete lack of understanding of making movies, both as an art form, and a practical process. If you want to learn more about how movies are made before you pontificate about the craft of making movies, I recommend looking at StudioBinder's youtube channel for a sub-cliff's-notes level introduction to how it's actually done.