AI Cinematic Realism (AICR) proposes a new framework for the post-camera era, shifting cinema's guiding question from "Is this real?" to "Is this true?" Grounded in embodied cognition and a lineage of realist movements, AICR defines synthetic truth through the Ideational Frame, Three-Strata Model, and accountable authorship.
The Latent Image — an excerpt from AI Cinematic Realism
This essay reframes cinematic realism as a phenomenon of perception rather than indexical truth. Drawing on phenomenology and philosophy of mind, it explores how AI-generated images can feel real without referring to the world, and how realism shifts in an era of generative systems and posthuman authorship.