Hollywood has spent the best part of a century convincing us that bigger means better. Bigger budgets, bigger stars, bigger franchises, bigger explosions, bigger data and bigger opening weekends.

Artificial intelligence might be about to blow that logic to pieces. And strangely, I think that could be wonderful.

While much of the film industry is busy discussing whether AI represents an existential threat to cinema, I wonder if we’re looking at it the wrong way around. What if this is not the beginning of the end, but the beginning of a new Renaissance? Not a Renaissance of machines making art for us. Quite the opposite! A Renaissance in which technology becomes so powerful, so cheap and so ubiquitous that the thing we suddenly value most is the one thing it cannot mass-produce: a genuinely human point of view.

There is an understandable panic running through the film industry about AI. Who owns an actor’s face? What happens to writers, editors, designers and visual effects artists? What happens when anybody with a laptop can create something that, five years ago , would have required a studio, hundreds of people and several million pounds? Whilst these are serious questions- I think there is an even bigger one: what happens to cinema when making images is no longer particularly difficult?

At Venice this year, George Clooney suggested that we are approaching a point where a film that currently costs hundreds of millions of dollars could eventually be made on a phone. Maggie Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, spoke about experimenting with AI before returning to human performers because what they gave her was simply more alive. Across the industry, studios, governments and technology companies are scrambling to work out what happens next. So perhaps this is the moment to say something mildly unfashionable. I am excited.

Not because I want computers to replace filmmakers. Quite the opposite. I think we may be approaching a period in which being unmistakably human becomes the most valuable commodity in culture.

We have been through technological upheavals before. The printing press didn’t destroy literature. Photography didn’t destroy painting. Television didn’t destroy cinema. Each technological shock produced an initial explosion of imitation and anxiety, then forced artists to reconsider what only they could contribute.

The arrival of movable type in Europe made reproducing and distributing ideas radically easier. It did not suddenly make ideas less valuable. If anything, it helped create the conditions for them to travel further, collide more violently and transform culture more quickly. Cinema has repeatedly followed a similar pattern. After years of making films across very different scales, I’ve seen how quickly the industry can confuse polish with progress - and how often the real shift begins somewhere rougher, stranger and less established.

After the Second World War, Italian filmmakers walked away from polished studio fantasies and took cameras into real streets. Rossellini’s Rome, Open City arrived in 1945. De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves followed in 1948. Ordinary faces, real locations, poverty, dirt and life became cinematic. Italian neorealism was revolutionary partly because it rejected what respectable cinema was supposed to look like. And there is a wonderful irony in what happened next: that rawness travelled across the Atlantic and helped influence a generation of American filmmakers, from Scorsese and Coppola to De Palma and beyond, who in turn reshaped Hollywood itself.

The rebellion was eventually absorbed by the very establishment it had set out to challenge. Then came the French New Wave. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in 1959. Godard’s Breathless in 1960. Handheld cameras, natural light, jump cuts, streets instead of sets and a gleeful disregard for the grammar filmmakers had been told was correct. Godard did not apologise for having fewer resources than a Hollywood studio. He turned what he had to hand into the language.

By the 1990s cinema had become polished enough again that Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg launched Dogme 95, demanding that filmmakers strip away artificial lighting, elaborate sets, special effects and much of the machinery that supposedly made a film cinematic. When cinema became too polished, they stripped it naked.

There is a pattern here. Whenever technology changes the rules, artists eventually stop asking how they can imitate the establishment more cheaply and start asking what they can do that the establishment cannot. That is where AI becomes interesting.

My fear isn’t that AI will make the next Citizen Kane. My fear is that it will make ten thousand perfectly competent things that nobody remembers. Meh. Because competence is about to become incredibly cheap. A beautiful image can be generated. A convincing fantasy landscape is becoming easier by the month. A technically proficient piece of content assembled from everything audiences previously responded to is already within reach. But taste is different. So is instinct. Humour. Obsession. Shame. Grief. Sexuality. Anger. The peculiar smell of your grandmother’s house. The reason one song makes you cry and you cannot quite explain why. A filmmaker’s geography, accent, failures, prejudices, contradictions and bad taste. That is where things become interesting. If a machine can make a perfectly competent image in seconds, competence is no longer the prize. Point of view is.

And this is where Hollywood should be careful, because Hollywood’s great temptation will be to use AI to make the same things faster. The same intellectual property, the same market-tested character arcs, the same franchises, the same focus groups, the same notes and the same terror of upsetting anybody. The same film, just produced more efficiently. How utterly depressing. Give the most revolutionary creative technology in a century to a committee and it will probably ask it to make another sequel. Independent filmmakers should do the opposite. Use AI. Don’t use AI. Shoot your film on an iPhone. Build everything by hand. Make it for £20,000 or £200 million. I genuinely don’t care. Just make something that could only have come from you. The real danger facing cinema is not artificial intelligence. It is artificial taste.

It is a culture gradually trained to believe that if enough people previously enjoyed a certain combination of story, star, genre and running time, then recombining those ingredients must eventually produce something meaningful. It won’t. Prediction is not imagination. An algorithm is very good at telling us what we liked yesterday. Culture happens when somebody shows us something we did not know we wanted tomorrow. That is why every great artistic movement looks slightly ridiculous at first. Punk looked ridiculous. The New Wave broke rules established filmmakers considered fundamental. The early modernists were accused of not knowing how to paint. The Sex Pistols did not arrive because market research identified a gap in Britain’s cultural offering. Somebody simply decided the existing thing was unbearable. That irritation matters. So does awkwardness. So does failure. So does the filmmaker who makes the wrong choice for reasons that are completely personal and somehow creates something nobody has seen before.

AI will almost certainly become part of filmmaking. Trying to prevent that completely is probably about as useful as trying to stop digital cameras or nonlinear editing. But embracing a tool is not the same as surrendering to its logic. The great opportunity is not to use AI to make filmmaking more conventional. It is to use the collapse in cost and difficulty to become more reckless, more local, more peculiar, more culturally specific, more personal, more dangerous and more human.

Perhaps that is where the new Renaissance begins. Not with a rejection of technology, but with a rediscovery of what technology cannot give us. The Renaissance itself was not a retreat from new tools. New methods of reproduction helped ideas circulate at extraordinary speed. Technology widened the field. Human beings decided what was worth saying. I believe we are now entering our own version of that moment.

For most of cinema’s history, production was scarce. Cameras were expensive. Film stock was expensive. Editing was expensive. Distribution was difficult. The means of making images belonged largely to institutions. Those barriers are collapsing. That means we are about to have more moving images than any human being could possibly consume. And when something becomes infinite, its value changes. When images become abundant, meaning becomes scarce. When everybody can generate style, having one becomes an act of rebellion. When machines can imitate polish, imperfection becomes interesting again. When content becomes infinite, point of view becomes precious. And when artificial intelligence is everywhere, human intelligence, human mistakes, human beauty, human ugliness and human experience may suddenly become culturally priceless. That sounds less like the death of cinema to me than the beginning of something. A new Renaissance.

So yes, embrace the technology. Break it. Abuse it. Ignore the instructions. Make things faster and make things cheaper. Then use the freedom it gives you to become weirder, more personal and more human. AI can give you an image. Hollywood can give you scale. An algorithm can tell you what everybody watched yesterday. None of them can tell you what needs to exist tomorrow. That’s still our job. And perhaps that is the irony Hollywood has not quite noticed yet. The age of artificial intelligence may be about to make being human more valuable than ever. Forget Hollywood. The next revolution in cinema will be ours.

Cine International Film Festival takes place 9-11th September cineinternationalfilmfestival.com