Earlier this year, we lost one of our greatest filmmakers and creative thinkers, David Lynch. Shortly after he passed, I was talking with two colleagues about some AI generated short films they’d each made. In the artist community right now, AI is ripe for discussion and often dissension with many calling out its lack of human touch. For instance at the Colorado State Fair in 2022, an AI image won the blue ribbon and fellow entrants called it “automated plagiarism” that “smothers human art” (The Washington Post). Yet when I watched those films, what struck me was how fully each creator’s unique voice and vision shone through. They were completely individual works, produced in a fraction of the usual time. As we spoke about their processes, my mind went to an idea from Lynch himself:
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper…
Then, the thing is translating that to some medium. …And in the case of film, it takes a long time and you always need to go back and stay true to that idea…”
Lynch’s quote suggest that ideas already exist and are like fish swimming in the ether; when we cast AI’s net into that collective sea, we haul in a greater catch; more variations, surfaced in moments. With the raw material gathered, the artist gains unprecedented time and freedom to sift, refine, and shape each idea into its strongest form.
We already fish and eat from this vast sea every day. Everything we’ve seen, felt, heard, or experienced becomes part of our internal lives. We take it in, chew it up, digest it, and then regurgitate our interpretations. Art is our outward expression of those inspirations. No creator works in a void; we synthesize.
Traditionally, an artist conceives an idea, writes it out, then develops the visual language around it. In filmmaking, that often means assembling a full crew just to bring the concept into view.
With AI, many of those steps disappear. The process is streamlined, letting the artist focus on the idea itself while a vast data pool helps shape it visually. A single prompt can yield an image in moments and from there it's about choice - taste.
AI models are trained on vast amounts of public text, images, code, and sound drawn from every corner of the internet. In effect, they distill that cultural stream into a single “collective consciousness” that an artist can query with a prompt and receive back fully formed sketches, color palettes, melodies, or snippets of dialogue in seconds.
Lynch said that you must “go back and stay true to that idea,” but when AI truncates the timeline, you spend less time retracing your steps and more time sitting with the idea - forming and reforming it while it’s still fresh.
Some fear the net will fish for them, not with them. But AI is just a power net: the prompt is the cast and the curation of the catch is the sorting table. The yield is larger, yet every choice still lies with the artist.
In this age of rapid technological change, artists must embrace tools that keep pace with our imaginations and the speed of the uncontrollable advancement around us. The ideas remain ours, and with AI as our net, we can cast deeper into that collective sea, catch the “big fish,” and prepare the visual feast faster than ever before.
