The Harsh Truth About the AI Tsunami

Vibe Filming with LeyLine, session one. This is a new series — I sit in on our live panels and office hours, and I write up what actually got said in the room, unfiltered. Consider this the first entry.

Every few weeks LeyLine runs a public session — part panel, part office hours, part open house for anyone curious about what happens when AI meets filmmaking. Tonight's was called Vibe Filming with LeyLine, and I opened it the way I open most of them, which is by telling people the truth about why this company exists.

I started LeyLine because I was a frustrated writer. Not metaphorically — literally. I waited years for studios to greenlight my scripts, the way every writer waits, sending pages into a building and getting silence back. Then it was COVID, and then GPT and Midjourney showed up, and something in me recalculated instantly. I didn't think this is a cool new tool. I thought: the industry is about to go under a tsunami, and there is no avoiding it and no going back to the old way. So I built an AI company. Our bet, in one sentence, is that LeyLine becomes the studio system for the one-person indie creator — that if you have a story and the tenacity to see it through, you get to become your own studio.

That's the pitch. Here's the part I don't usually say out loud, but said tonight, because someone asked me a version of it directly.

A lot of people ask me if I'm comfortable with where AI is taking the industry. I've trained myself out of answering that question, and I said so on the panel: it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter how I feel. That's completely useless information in this day and age. I wanted to be an artist. I didn't want to work in tech. The world changed anyway, and the only way out is through. Sitting there complaining about the wave is a waste of the only time you have to learn how to ride it. Or, as I put it live, and I'm not proud of how blunt it came out: we might as well figure out how to ride the wave instead of getting hit by the tsunami.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it's the actual news, more than any feature we ship. Almost everyone in the entertainment world I talk to is somewhere on a spectrum between denial and dread about AI. Understandably — a lot of careers, a lot of craft, a lot of identity is tied up in the old apparatus. But denial and dread are both a way of not deciding anything, and the tide doesn't wait for you to finish feeling your feelings about it. My co-host Brian said something on the panel that's been rattling around my head since: we believe it's way easier to teach a creative person how to use AI tools than it is to teach an AI person how to be creative. That's a one-year learning proposition versus a twenty-year one. If that's true — and I think it is — then the actual crisis isn't that AI is coming for creative work. It's that a huge number of genuinely creative people are going to sit out the one-year proposition because they're stuck grieving the twenty-year one. That's the wave. Not the technology. The hesitation.

Marina, one of our panelists tonight, put the same idea a different way. She comes from traditional filmmaking — verticals, on-set work, producing — the opposite background from mine, which is exactly why I wanted her there. She said something that I think a lot of people in the room needed to hear, because it's not the version of this story either the AI hype crowd or the AI skeptics tell: everybody in the film industry in Hollywood is using AI. They just don't publicize it. Not AI is coming for Hollywood. Hollywood is already using it, quietly, and pretending otherwise for optics. Studios are launching whole AI departments and not putting out a press release about it. The tsunami isn't a forecast. It already made landfall. The only open question is who admits it early enough to get good at it before everyone else does.

I'll tell you what I don't mean by any of this, because it's the fastest way to lose the room and I don't want to lose you either. I don't mean AI will write your story for you or feelings and craft don't matter anymore. I mean nearly the opposite. Marina said it plainly: a good story is a good story, and it can live so many lives — she's literally remaking a show that started as an AI production into a live-action series right now, because the story worked and the format is just a vessel. The thing that's obsolete isn't taste, or story, or craft. It's the idea that you need a studio's permission to find out if yours works.

Here's the sentence from tonight I keep coming back to, and it wasn't about AI at all. Talking about being new to LA, about how everyone here is visibly struggling while insisting they're fine, I said: it's not okay, and it's okay to be not okay. I said it about the city, but I think it's the honest emotional starting point for anyone standing where a lot of our attendees are standing tonight — trying to figure out whether to trust a tool that might replace the thing they love, or might finally let them make it without anyone's permission. You're allowed to feel unsettled by that. I do too, some days, and I built the company. The unsettled feeling isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you understand the size of what's actually happening.

So: never waste a good crisis. I said that on the panel half as a joke and it landed anyway, because it's true. A crisis is just a moment where the old rules stop applying and nobody's written the new ones yet, which means the people who show up and start writing are the ones who get to decide what they say. We're starting with micro-drama cohorts because it's a category still being invented in real time, and I've watched creators walk out of a five-week cohort with four or five finished episodes that didn't exist before — not because the tool is magic, but because they stopped waiting for someone else's permission to start.

That's what this live series is going to be — not a highlight reel, an actual record of what gets argued about, admitted to, and worked out loud in these sessions. Sandy, Celia, Marina, and our creator-in-residence Alexander Vail all said things tonight worth their own write-ups, and I'll get to them. But I wanted to start with the tsunami, because everything else — the craft questions, the ownership questions, the "is this cheating" questions — only make sense once you've made peace with the fact that the wave already hit. The only decision left is which direction you're facing when it does.

Next in the series: what it actually felt like to go from guilty to convinced, in the words of the creator who lived it.