For all the noise that’s been made about how generative AI is poised to revolutionize the filmmaking industry, there haven’t really been any projects created with the technology that felt like the sort of entertainment people would pay to see. Most AI firms’ video models are still only capable of churning out short bursts of visually inconsistent footage. And some of Hollywood’s biggest AI partnerships have suddenly evaporated in ways that make it seem like studios might not be able to rely on the new technology coming out of Silicon Valley. For the most part, short-form video slop appears to be the only thing that major production houses are capable of cooking up with gen AI. But that could change if studios take notes from some of the experimental projects that debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Though it feels unlikely that gen AI will ever be able to whip up a compelling movie whole cloth, Tribeca featured a number of films that demonstrated how human artists can leverage the technology in compelling ways.

While none of the AI-powered movies that screened at Tribeca were as terrible as the video slop companies like OpenAI and xAI have polluted the internet with, some of the projects were prime examples of why generative content tends to feel so lifeless compared to human-crafted art. Roar — an animated short produced by Illuminai Studios — felt more like a disorienting montage of AI-generated clips rather than a cohesive piece of cinema. And Asteria Film Co.’s ChikaBOOM! lacked the visual and sonic polish that’s necessary for fast-paced fantasy about a magician in training to really pull you in.

Roar and ChikaBOOM!’s overall roughness seemed to be a reflection of the inherent technological limitations baked into their respective AI-forward production workflows. But other films, like Google DeepMind’s Dear Upstairs Neighbors and OpenAI’s Mauvais Soleil, showcased how it’s possible for filmmakers to avoid those challenges when gen AI is deployed with a bit more ingenuity.

Written and directed by Pixar veteran Connie Qin He in collaboration with researchers from Google DeepMind, Dear Upstairs Neighbors tells the story of an exhausted young woman who’s trying to go to bed. All Ada (Márcia Mayer, who also produced the short) wants is to get a couple hours of peaceful rest before she has to wake up and get back to work. But every time she begins dozing off, the cacophony of noise coming from her upstairs neighbors’ apartment jolts her awake and leaves her wondering what they could possibly be doing in the middle of the night.

To give Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ world a distinct style, He enlisted Pixar production designer Yingzong Xin, who painted concept art in Photoshop and on paper using acrylics. Those illustrations’ expressionistic aesthetic was key to bringing Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ fantastical story to life, but it also presented a unique challenge to DeepMind’s researchers. With most AI video generation models, the illustrations’ painterly style would be difficult to turn into visually consistent footage. But DeepMind’s engineers developed custom versions of Veo and Imagen that were specifically designed to give Dear Upstairs Neighbors’ artists the ability to fine-tune their outputs.