Industry leaders at AI summit navigate future of storytelling

New Delhi: Beyond the buzzwords and billion-dollar projections, the India AI Summit revealed a more layered anxiety. Can AI democratise intelligence for India’s underserved, or will it dilute craft and creativity? 

As executives and filmmakers weighed in, the discussion pivoted from efficiency to ethics, from automation to authorship. The question was no longer what AI can create, but who it ultimately serves in a country as vast as India.

India has always been described as a leapfrog economy, a nation that skips stages and vaults straight into the future. For Niraj Ruparel, Creative Technology Lead at WPP, that leap is not just about faster payments or cheaper data. It is about intelligence itself becoming accessible.

“India is a leapfrog economy. When I look at India, I think it’s a transformational space for all of us as Indians. India is a country of 1.5 billion people. We are saying there are 1 billion who are on mobility, who are having mobile phones. And we are saying there are 3.5 billion odd Indians who are on the bottom of the pyramid where there is no access to information which presents a massive opportunity.”

Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, risks becoming another tool enjoyed primarily by the affluent and the urban. Ruparel’s question is both simple and urgent.

“When I looked at AI, I asked myself, why is this intelligent era restricted to an affluent set of guys here? Why can’t it be taken all the way to the bottom of the pyramid and empower them? The success of any government, any ministry is to take the entire population along. That’s the only way the country is going to grow. So, someone who has been designing rural marketing solutions for years and years, my thought was, let’s take these best of LLM platforms to the bottom of the pyramid and empower them to make informed decisions.”

Yet while one part of the industry sees AI as empowerment, another grapples with unease. Tyrone Estephan, Managing Director of Alt. VFX Group believes the resistance to AI runs deeper than job anxiety.

“I think deep down, there’s something happening on a subconscious level. On the face of it, there’s that fear of AI and that dislike of AI. People have heard terms like ‘AI slop.’ And I would suggest that even something featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, as advanced as the picture might be at the moment, could still fall under that category of slop.

Because it’s not a film. It’s definitely not a 90-minute film, and I’d like to see them try. I’ve tried to make a five-minute film, and it’s possible but near impossible. So I think what we’re actually averse to is this. We want craft, we want quality, we want proof that what we’re watching, or hearing, or seeing, or reading is genuine and is coming from a real place,” he said.

The phrase 'AI slop' has entered popular vocabulary to describe synthetic content that feels hollow. Perfectly rendered faces and seamless edits cannot compensate for the absence of intention. Audiences sense when something lacks authorship. The discomfort, as Estephan suggested, may not be about technology at all. It may be about authenticity.

That distinction becomes sharper when viewed through the lens of high-end filmmaking. Merzin Tavaria, Co-Founder and President of Global Production and Operations at DNEG, drew a clear line between content and cinema.

“Storytelling is different. There’s storytelling, there’s entertainment, and there’s filmmaking. It’s like YouTube has a lot of cat videos. That's content. That’s entertainment. You’re just flipping through. It’s not necessarily storytelling.”

He then pointed to the rarefied world of tentpole cinema.

“The same goes when we talk about the highest level of work, when we’re working on a Dune or Oppenheimer or those kinds of projects. The level of the filmmaker’s vision is so high. The attention to detail, where everything is art directed and every performance is directed by the filmmaker because he has a vision, that’s filmmaking. At that point, the expectation is really high, and AI is still catching up. It may get there. But that human element, as we spoke about, is so strong. That’s what sets it apart from regular AI output.”

In Tavaria’s framing, AI is not the enemy of cinema. It is simply not yet the author. Vision, curation and emotional coherence still require human orchestration. The gulf between a casually generated clip and a film shaped by a director’s intent remains wide.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that the AI debate is not binary. It is layered. At one end lies the promise of democratised intelligence, tools that can expand access and agency across India’s vast social spectrum. At the other lies a creative community wrestling with standards of craft and authenticity.