The Filmmaker Demystifying AI Through Storytelling
Professor of Cinematic Arts Holly Willis is exploring ways to use AI as a creative experience.
July 20, 2026By Chinyere Cindy Amobi
Across USC’s schools and campuses, researchers, faculty and practitioners are developing innovative solutions for societal issues, imagining new approaches to making art and finding ways for creators to prepare for a shifting landscape as AI increasingly intersects with different fields.
Under USC President Beong-Soo Kim’s leadership, advancing ethical AI that puts people first has become a university priority — building on USC’s legacy of innovation while preparing the next generation of researchers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and health professionals.
This story is part of Trojan Family Magazine’s AI series highlighting the people and ideas driving USC’s vision forward.
USC School of Cinematic Arts Professor Holly Willis’ initial attitude toward artificial intelligence could only be described as “a mixture of horror and curiosity.”
“AI is going to radically reshape the film industry — but it’s also radically reshaping how we understand ourselves as humans and interact with each other on a day-to-day basis,” says Willis, who serves as chair of media arts and practice at the school. “The implications for us as a culture are dramatic.”
A few years ago, Willis co-founded AI for Media & Storytelling with Associate Professor Mike Ananny of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The initiative, which operates within the USC Center for Generative AI and Society, is a collaboration between the two schools to experiment with and debate the power of artificial intelligence for media and storytelling.
“The idea was that these are two industries, radically disrupted by AI, both dealing with storytelling,” Willis says. “Sometimes, when storytellers get together and see other ways of telling stories, it can ignite new ideas about ways forward.”
The idea was that these are two industries, radically disrupted by AI, both dealing with storytelling. Sometimes, when storytellers get together and see other ways of telling stories, it can ignite new ideas about ways forward.
USC School of Cinematic Arts Professor Holly Willis
Willis and Ananny spent two years hosting workshops for faculty to explore research topics related to storytelling and AI and bring what they learned into the classroom. Willis says that content theft is a common fear among faculty in the creative arts.
Faculty also express concern about the environmental impacts of AI tools and issues around copyrighting content.
In the classroom, student conversations oscillate between excitement at the ease of use and endless possibility of emerging AI tools and the lack of “friction” that occurs when bypassing the traditional methods of creation.
“With AI, there’s none of that interaction, there’s not a lot of sense of getting better,” Willis says. “The friction that you have with a kind of embodied experience with an art form is gone, and I think with the tools that’s the goal: to make it so easy. In some ways, that’s great, but I think as artists, my students really want to have that friction.”
Nevertheless, the school is forming partnerships to ensure that its students will have the tools to thrive in an industry landscape already transformed by AI. Last semester, Google Flow gave several School of Cinematic Arts faculty credits for all their students to have access to three months of its highest membership, called Google AI Ultra. In exchange for feedback from students about the tool, students get to make images and videos using a tool valued at about $250 a month. Likewise, Willis says Amazon is sponsoring more than a dozen projects in exchange for student feedback.
A project last year by School of Cinematic Arts alumna Xindi Zhang, part of the Amazon Studios’ Future Cinema Creators Project, won the 2025 Student Academy Award for alternative/experimental filmmaking. Zhang used her own watercolor art to train an AI model to create a dreamy aesthetic that she then incorporated into her documentary called The Song of Drifters, about people who have left their homes and are “drifting” through the world.
Several School of Cinematic Arts faculty also teach courses centered on AI, including Willis’ “AI and Creativity,” classes on virtual production, and classes in directing and editing with AI in the production division, among others. “It’s very much like teaching in real time,” says Willis, who mentioned that she now begins each class with an update on the latest developments on filmmaking, social media and AI.
In line with the program’s goal of demystifying AI and exploring its potential, Willis also recently served as a co-curator for Flux Festival in collaboration with the USC Gould School of Law and the Mozilla Foundation. The event provided a space for filmmakers and storytellers to showcase their creativity using AI tools while also exploring what the future holds for these art forms through discussions with media and legal experts.
“We haven’t had a lot of conversations as a nation about what we want to see happen going forward, and, more specifically, in the film industry,” Willis says. “I also think that we need to be thinking about what all of these things mean, because the concept of the image is radically different in this new art form. I think we need to be talking about this.”
Read the entire series: USC at the Leading Edge of AI
Part 1: The Business Students | Part 2: The Pharmaceutical Developers | Part 3: The Creatives | Part 4: The Filmmaker | Part 5: The Urban Planners
