An Emerging History of AI Cinema: Generative Short Films and the Search for Meaning, Worldwide and in Turkey

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence has entered film production with unusual speed, moving within a decade from experimental AI-written screenplays to short films in which every image and sound is machine-generated. This study maps that trajectory. Drawing on a corpus of AI-assisted and fully AI-generated short fiction films produced between 2016 and 2025 — assembled from festival programmes, online platforms, and the emerging scholarly literature, and including a sustained account of Turkish production — the article reconstructs the formative history of what is here called AI cinema. The analysis proceeds in three moves. First, it periodizes the field into a script-generation era (2016–2018), a generative turn driven by diffusion-based image and video models (2022–2023), and a phase of fully generated shorts and dedicated festival infrastructures (2024–). Second, drawing on Tom Gunning’s concept of the cinema of attractions and recent theorizations of algorithmic images, it reads the corpus as a recapitulation of early cinema’s movement from technological display towards narrative integration. Third, it situates Turkish productions within this global picture, arguing that, for the first time in the history of a major cinematic technology, Turkish filmmakers have entered the field at the moment of its global emergence rather than belatedly. The article closes by identifying the genre affinities, authorship configurations, and aesthetic tendencies — the dreamlike, the uncanny, the historical — that currently characterize the search for meaning in AI-generated short film, and by outlining directions for future research.