There is a new shelf on this platform for a reason. Scroll the Sci-Fi and Fantasy sections and you will find shorts made largely with AI generation tools — full narratives, scored, edited, released free.

Two years ago these were five-second clips with melting faces. Now some of them hold a scene.

What has genuinely changed

Shot consistency, mostly. The reason early AI video felt unwatchable was that the same character would not survive two cuts. Newer pipelines hold a face, a costume and a location well enough that your brain stops flagging it, and once your brain stops flagging it you start following the story instead of the technique.

The other change is cost. A short that would have needed a crew, a location and a month now needs one person, a laptop and patience.

Where I am sceptical

Almost all of it is still look and not story. You can generate a cathedral in a sandstorm. You cannot generate a reason to care about the man walking into it. The tools have solved the expensive part of filmmaking and left the hard part untouched.

There is also a fairness question nobody has answered honestly. These models learned from other people's films. The people who made those films were not asked and are not paid.

Why I still think Nigerian creators should be paying attention

Because the barrier that has always hurt us most is capital, not imagination. A student in Owerri with a good idea and no ₦20 million has, for the first time, a route to a finished film. That is worth taking seriously even while the tools are flawed.

Your turn

• Have you watched an AI film all the way through — did it hold you?
• Should a fully AI-generated film be eligible for a Nollywood award?
• If you had these tools today, what would you make?

Opinion piece. The films referenced are publicly available on YouTube and listed in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy sections here.