Could you prove your last project wasn't made with AI?
The piece
Could you prove your last project wasn't made with AI? No Film School ran a piece last week by Matt Allen, making a point I haven't been able to put down. If you're the one who ends up holding the paperwork when a delivery goes sideways, this one's yours.
For a year, the argument's been about whether you should use AI. That's not the question at delivery. The question is: prove what you did. His argument: claiming your work is human-made no longer works as an assumed baseline with distributors.
You used to be believed by default. That default is going away. And it attaches to paperwork that already exists. Chain of title. Music licenses. Errors and omissions insurance. Here's the part that should worry you. Doing this after the fact means reconstructing the legal history of thousands of files, scattered across old drives and email threads.
What counts as proof is stuff you already make. Dated script drafts. Camera raw, with the metadata still on it. DAW sessions. Deal memos. Vendor licenses. Thirty years in, nobody has ever asked me to prove a shot was real. I'm starting the folder on the next job anyway.
Now, honestly: no film has publicly died on this yet. This is a burden arriving, not one that's landed. Don't go buy anything over it. But start the folder on day one of your next job. Day one, it costs you nothing, you just drop things in as you go. A year later, it's archaeology. And stop stripping metadata out of habit. It just stopped being clutter and started being evidence.
Source: No Film School -- Matt Allen.