Ava DuVernay Defends Using AI in New Doc ’14th’

As Ava DuVernay continues to hit the festival circuit for her new documentary 14th, the director is opening up about her decision to use AI on elements of the film.

The doc is a deep dive on the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the fight over birthright citizenship, featuring archival photographs that are brought to life with the help of AI. This has sparked some criticism online, which DuVernay addressed to The Hollywood Reporter as the doc screened at AFI Fest on Sunday.

“The tools that the artists used to do the parallax and the animation in the films have that technology in it, as does Pro Tools with sound, as does Avid with editorial, as does Resolve with color,” she said of industry post-production tools. “I think we’ve come to a place in filmmaking where we have to be really sober about the ways in which that technology is [used] across so much of the workflow.”

She continued of the AI, “We didn’t use it to fabricate a person or make an avatar of a person or approximate someone’s voice that said something they didn’t say. We actually animated some photos that are in the public domain, and from what we’ve been hearing from people it does bring people closer to that time in history, which was our goal. So people have to see it and check it out for themselves and make their decisions about how they feel.”

14th comes a decade after DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated doc 13th, exploring the U.S. prison system and racial inequality in the light of the 13th Amendment. However, she doesn’t see the new film as a direct follow-up, and started considering a return to the Constitution after “hearing the current president talking about his desire to dismantle birthright citizenship while he was a candidate; he said he would do it in his first week in office. He actually did it in his first day in office, he attacked birthright citizenship.”

“I don’t know much about the 14th Amendment at that point but I know birthright citizenship is in it. So we start thinking about the possibility of making this film at that point,” the filmmaker said, and “once we saw all of the tentacles of the current administration attacking this amendment, we knew that there was more there. So we investigated it and that’s what the film became.”

14th will get a limited theatrical run starting Nov. 27, and start streaming on Netflix on Dec. 4.