Two years ago, AI was the villain.
Not the cool kind that flickers across the big screen with style and chaos, but the kind that led thousands of real-life creatives—actors, writers, designers—to walk off set and into the streets. AI was the ghost in the machine, threatening to erase jobs, voices, and livelihoods. Hollywood’s labor strikes made that clear: machines might mimic us, but they can’t be us.
And yet, here we are. AI is no longer the shadowy antagonist—it’s winning Oscars.
Let that sink in.
The same technology that ignited historic strikes is now fine-tuning the accents of Oscar-winning actors and sliding quietly into the credits of some of the year’s biggest films. From The Brutalist to Emilia Perez, AI has gone from a feared disruptor to a welcomed collaborator—at least among those with enough power to control its use.
But for those still watching from outside the glitter of Silver Lake cocktail parties and Moon valley-funded soundstages, this shift begs a bigger question: What happens when the fight moves inside the house?
Make no mistake—this is no longer a question of whether AI will be in entertainment, but how. And perhaps more importantly, who will be at the table to shape that future?
It’s not lost on me that in the same breath we celebrate AI’s artistic potential, we’re still untangling the lawsuits from creatives who say their voices, scripts, and likenesses were scraped to train these models. The art was pulled from the internet—their art—and fed into systems that may one day generate characters, performances, and entire scenes without ever writing a check to the people who inspired them.
That’s not innovation. That’s erasure wrapped in efficiency.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
This moment is so complicated because the tech itself is not the enemy. As Moonvalley’s founders argue, AI can be a fast, powerful, even revolutionary tool. It can help an indie filmmaker create a world they otherwise couldn’t afford. It can give a kid in Brooklyn or Nairobi the power to tell a blockbuster story. AI can do all that—but only if we remain the authors.
Not just the users. The authors.
If there’s one thing Black storytellers have always known, it’s the danger of losing control of your narrative. History is full of our ideas told by someone else’s mouth. AI threatens to do the same, at scale. And so, the moment calls not for fear, but for positioning—strategic, unapologetic, creative positioning.
We must fight for frameworks that protect our likenesses, voices, and intellectual labor. We must ensure that Black creators are not just in the training data, but in the boardrooms deciding how that data is used. And we must resist the temptation to believe that being replaced by a tool is “the future.”
Because the future doesn’t have to mean less humanity; if we’re bold enough, it could mean more. More access, more collaboration, more imagination. But only if artists lead.
AI can help us paint the scene.
But it should never fully write the story for us.
