The Common Knowledge Project

We’re a group of filmmakers and technologists who’ve been meeting since 2023 to talk about how new technologies are changing the way we work.

We come to these conversations with different experiences and points of view, but a shared belief that the people who make films must help define how the industry evolves.

We’re developing shared language for the difficult questions ahead, because how we describe this work will help shape how it’s done.

We’ll share what we learn along the way, and we invite you to join the conversation.

Our participants come from across filmmaking and technology, and some work at companies that develop these tools. We believe it’s important to be open about who’s part of these conversations and the perspectives they bring.

Our Gathering Place

A home for our conversation.

The American Film Institute has been part of our discussions and shares our interest in the future of filmmaking.

We’ve chosen AFI as the home for publishing our working papers and inviting more people from across the industry to join the conversation.

As a nonprofit dedicated to the art of film, AFI offers a home that doesn’t belong to any single studio, company, or guild.

Our Working Papers

As our conversations continue, we’ll publish what we learn and invite others to build on it.

Each paper is a living document. We’ll revise it as the technology and our understanding change, and earlier versions will remain available.

Our first paper is Human Generative Workflow.

Human Generative Workflow (HGW)
An Invitation to Conversation — Version 1.0, October 2026

Not all uses of AI in filmmaking are the same.

Our first paper proposes a vocabulary for distinguishing between utility techniques, human generative workflow, and machine generative work.

At its center is a distinction between tools that serve an artist’s creative decisions and processes in which the machine determines the expressive result.

We offer this as a starting point for discussion, not a final standard.

Comments received by [date] will help inform Version 2.0.

v.01