At this year’s fourth edition of the Ethics in Documentary Film conference, organized by CEMETIK in collaboration with the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, we focused on the theme Creative Control and Authorship in the Age of AI. The full-day programme, held on 30 October 2025 at the Horácké Theatre in Jihlava, opened up questions about how generative artificial intelligence is reshaping the concepts of authorship, responsibility, credibility, and authenticity in documentary filmmaking. The discussions addressed both the theoretical mapping of the problem and concrete practical experience, as well as possible ways of keeping human responsibility at the centre of the creative process.
The programme began with a morning meeting with students, which created space for sharing questions related to authorship, representation, and audience trust at a time when both images and sounds are increasingly being produced with the help of AI. This was followed by an academic panel moderated by Veronika Kováč, featuring Katerina Cizek from the MIT Co-Creation Studio, Lucie Králová and Miriam Ryndová from Future Memory Lab, Andreea Lăcătuș from One World Romania, Marta Materska-Samek from Jagiellonian University, and Jan Motal from Masaryk University. The panel offered a broad view of the ethical risks of AI in documentary film: from the erosion of human creativity and the flattening of diversity, through the issue of deepfake reconstructions, to the possibilities of restoring creative control through open-source tools and collective practice.
A key highlight of the programme was the keynote lecture by British filmmaker and academic Dominic Lees, devoted to the transformation of documentary film in the age of artificial intelligence. Lees focused on how the traditional network of trust between filmmaker, protagonist, and audience is being disrupted, and how AI is changing the very perception of documentary truthfulness. This was followed by Piotr Winiewicz’s case study of the film About a Hero, which offered a detailed insight into an experiment in human–algorithm co-authorship inspired by the style of Werner Herzog. The practical and professional dimension of the topic was then developed further in the afternoon industry panel, Industry Perspective: Who Controls the Documentary in the Age of AI?, which raised the question of where power and responsibility in documentary filmmaking truly lie today — with the director, production, legal frameworks, or increasingly with technological systems.
This year’s edition once again showed that the ethics of documentary film is not merely an accompanying reflection on finished works, but is increasingly becoming part of the creative process itself. Artificial intelligence brings not only new tools, but also new conflicts around control, trust, representation, and responsibility. That is precisely why we consider it important to continue linking academic debate, film practice, and students’ experience, and to create a space in which these transformations can be critically reflected on together.
Video recordings from this year’s edition are available online on the Ji.hlava website, and we are once again preparing a conference proceedings volume.