There is a question that haunts every comment section on the internet right now: "Did you actually make that?"
If I type a prompt into Google Veo or Midjourney, and the machine generates a stunning image of a cyberpunk Cairo, who is the artist? Is it me? Is it the engineer who wrote the code? Or is it the millions of artists whose work trained the model?
This is the boring conversation. It is a legal argument, not an artistic one.
As a director working on The First Frame, I have discovered a much more interesting problem. I call it The Prompt-Origin Paradox.
And it is changing the definition of what it means to be a Director.
The Paradox Defined
Here is the scenario:
I prompt the AI for a scene: "A lonely astronaut walking through a desert of glass."
The AI generates the shot. But in the corner of the frame, the AI "hallucinates" a reflection that looks like a skull.
I didn’t ask for the skull. It was a mathematical error. A glitch.
But I choose to keep it. I rewrite the entire script based on that skull. It becomes the central metaphor of the movie.
Who wrote the skull?
I didn’t prompt it. The AI doesn’t "know" what a skull is. It happened in the gap between command and execution.
This is the Prompt-Origin Paradox: The most creative element of the scene came from nowhere. My job wasn’t to create it. My job was to recognize it.
From Bricklayer to Curator
For 100 years, directors were Bricklayers.
If Spielberg wanted a dinosaur, he had to build it, texture it, light it, and animate it. Every pixel was intentional. If it wasn’t explicitly ordered, it didn’t exist.
The Sovereign Director is a Curator.
We are standing in front of a firehose of infinite content. The AI can generate 1,000 variations of that astronaut scene in an hour.
990 of them will be garbage.
9 of them will be good.
1 of them will contain a "Ghost"—a moment of unexpected brilliance that no human could have planned.
My value is no longer my ability to "build" the shot. My value is my Taste. My ability to look at the chaos and say, "That one. That is the movie."
Excavating the Latent Space
In my studio, Adel Abdel-Dayem AI Productions, we don’t say we are "making" images. We say we are "Excavating."
We treat the Latent Space (the mathematical void where AI images live) like an archeological site. The movie Kemet’s Enigma already exists inside the code. It is buried under layers of noise.
My prompts are just the shovels.
Sometimes I dig for a character and I find a monster. A traditional director would say, "Wrong, do it again." A Sovereign Director says, "The monster is better. The script just changed."
The Final Barrier
This terrifies people because it lowers the barrier to entry. If "Technical Skill" is no longer the barrier, then anyone can be a director.
Exactly.
But this creates a new, much higher barrier: The Vision Barrier.
When everyone can generate 4k footage instantly, "High Fidelity" becomes worthless. It becomes cheap. The only thing that will have value is Unique Perspective.
The AI can give you the pixels, but it cannot give you the Reason.
It can give you the "Happy Accident," but it cannot tell you if it’s Art.
That is still my job. And it is the only job that matters.
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