What AI Can’t Do:

Truth, Place, and the Responsibility of Story

Mary-Jane's Home

Have you recently encountered stories about artificial intelligence? Of course you have. They are difficult to avoid unless you consciously step away from the digital world altogether.

AI now drives its own algorithms, and filmmaking is fast becoming part of its daily sustenance. Producers have been awarded significant prizes for AI-generated short films. These developments are fascinating, and they speak to how quickly creative tools are evolving.

But they also clarify something important about the kind of work we make.

At Nidd Films, our projects are not generated.

They are encountered.

Our films begin with listening, to landscapes, to archives, and to the quiet traces of lives that once existed. They are shaped through real locations, documented histories, and ethical engagement with place. The work depends on what is already there, not on what can be simulated.

Artificial intelligence has a role to play in contemporary practice. It can assist with research, help organise information, and support early structuring and development. Used carefully, it can help uncover patterns, connections, and questions that might otherwise remain hidden.

But AI cannot speak for history.

It cannot negotiate access to a real house where a woman once lived.

It cannot sit with refusal from an institution and adjust a story ethically.

It cannot carry responsibility for how a life is represented.

It cannot hold truth.

Truth is not an output.

The films we make depend on presence, on being in a place, understanding its limits, and responding to what history allows and what it resists. They are shaped as much by constraint as by intention. This process cannot be automated, because it requires judgement, care, lived understanding, and accountability.

AI can generate images.

It can approximate emotion.

It can accelerate production.

But it cannot witness.

And it cannot replace the responsibility of telling a true story in the real world, where places have memory and representation has consequences.

That is where our work sits.

Not against technology, but alongside it, clear about what tools can assist and what must remain human.