Culture Can’t Be Automated — or Can It?: Storytelling and AI

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In every era of Black storytelling, from the drum to the pen, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Independent Film Movement, technology has adapted to its truth, not the other way around. But artificial intelligence presents a different kind of reckoning. Who gets to feed the machine? Whose stories train the algorithm? And when AI generates a narrative, a face, or a voice, whose culture is it drawing from, and who profits?

This panel brings together filmmakers, writers, tech professionals, and cultural critics to discuss the most pressing creative questions of our moment. We’ll explore how AI tools are reshaping production, distribution, and authorship, and what that means specifically for Black artists who have long had to fight for the right to tell their own stories on their own terms.

Are these new tools liberation or extraction? Creative expansion or culture strip mining? And in an era where an algorithm can mimic style but has never known struggle or lived cultural experiences, what does it mean to make something real?

Join Austin Film Society and the Pan African Film Festival at the AFS Cinema on Sunday, August 2, for a conversation about preservation, power, and the irreplaceable soul at the center of Black cinema, followed by a mixer at 4 PM in the AFS Cinema lobby.

See the full 2026 Pan African Film Festival lineup here.

This project is supported in part by an Elevate Grant of Austin Arts, Culture, Music and Entertainment.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.