Truth & Consequences: Documentary in the Age of AI — Shapeshifting Stories & Communities

If you work in factual media, if you are curious about artificial intelligence, and if you care about ethics at the intersection of where these two worlds meet, then you've come to the right place.

I've always been fascinated by the interplay of technology and media. From the launch of MIT's Media Lab through the earliest websites, broadcast transformations, mobile streaming, social media, fan engagement, I've helped storytellers navigate and drive every major shift. And I see patterns with each new disruption. But AI is also a quantum leap. And more than just another paintbrush for creators.

Now is our time as Canadian leaders with values of truth-telling, a desire for data sovereignty, and a thirst for creative innovation to lead this conversation, not just participate in it. We are tasked with defining what AI-in-a-media-context becomes before others define it for us.

Defining New Terms

We can start with some simple definitions that lay the ground for the conversations I’ve had with incredible guests, including friends and colleagues that I'll introduce you to in each episode of Truth & Consequences: Documentary in the age of AI. At a basic level, we can define:

1)     Artificial intelligence as software that learns. 

2)     Documentary as real life, creatively told. 

3)     And ethics, well, ethics is an ongoing human conversation that attempts to guide us in our day-to-day lives through uncertainty and crises, and in this case with every new technology that we unleash. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies what is morally right and wrong, good and bad, and how people ought to act.

Over the course of four episodes, you’ll meet documentary legends, AI ethicists, innovators, educators and community builders who are all redefining what it means to tell true stories in an age when truth itself is under pressure. 

How AI Shapes Media

When it comes to AI and media, we have three core pillars:

1)     AI that streamlines and advances traditional media, supporting creative teams at every stage from development to distribution. 

2)     Second, we have synthetic media. These are videos produced entirely by prompts to artificial intelligence, often featuring people, objects and worlds that don't exist, although they may look real. 

3)     Finally, we have AI-as-subject-matter, as a theme for inquiry, for science fiction, for news, for drama and of course for documentaries. For our purposes, this is AI under the microscope. What cost does it exact on society and the planet? Who owns the ideas and content? And what are its biases?

During our conversations on Truth & Consequences, distinct yet complementary forces emerged as keys to navigating this landscape. Storytelling still comes down to ethics: who is the authentic story holder, whose truth is represented, and how the documentarian’s toolbox shapes the frame. While tech can scale you overnight, reaching an audience always comes down to community. And trust still gets built the old way, one person at a time.

Consent & Context

Filmmaker and scholar Dr. Lyana Patrick brought an urgent perspective to our discussion on Indigenous data sovereignty and cultural representation. As large language models ingest vast amounts of public data, hyper-local histories and oral traditions risk being scraped, flattened and reassembled without consent or context. Challenging creators to conduct personal AI audits, Dr. Patrick asks, "Do you want AI to have all of your knowledge and information?" Dr. Patrick’s documentary Nacheko: It Will Be a Big River Again, focuses on Indigenous resilience, unity, and environmental stewardship. As a member of the Stellat’en First Nation and Assistant Professor and Faculty Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, her work reminds us that true innovation in storytelling requires protecting narrative sovereignty—ensuring that communities retain ownership over how their lived experiences are digitized and shared.

Tool as Topic

In January, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist premiered at Sundance. In May, Steven Soderbergh faced criticism at Cannes for using generative AI imagery in his John Lennon documentary, John Lennon: The Last Interview, with Meta providing AI tools and production supporting roughly half the film’s budget. Later that month, Tribeca announced the premiere of Dreams of Violets, a feature-length film generated entirely with AI that depicts Iran’s violent crackdown on protesters. The events it draws on were real; the images bringing them to life were not.

The tool is becoming the topic, and documentary is built for this: contested facts, powerful interests, a public that deserves the full picture. 

Filmmaker Liz Marshall is making this turn deliberately. Her documentaries have tackled challenging themes of animal rights, food systems, land and water, and her first feature, Water on the Table, came out in 2010. She is now in development with the NFB on a film about AI competing with humanity for its most basic physical resources. In the process, Marshall deliberately limits her use of AI, tools that depend on the resource-intensive infrastructure examined in her film. She also invites us to critique what we watch, to deepen our AI literacy: "We can't just assume that if we're seeing something online, that it is archive or that it's authentic. We need to look in a way that we didn't have to before."

A Lens on Community

We also need to look at audiences differently. Fan building and community engagement can make or break the success of any documentary. Since documentaries often deal with challenging topics, marketing to audiences can be a delicate dance. The promotional messages and engagement tactics must reflect the substance of the documentary and rally viewers around content that's sometimes difficult to watch.

In the outdated documentary playbook, marketing and audience engagement were treated as post-production considerations, activities relegated to the final months before a festival premiere or broadcast release. Today, in an era dominated by algorithmic feed curation and hyper-fragmented media consumption, putting audiences last just won’t cut it—music to my ears after 25 years of pioneering fan-building! 

Shifts like these also put more pressure on independent creators, who are increasingly expected to operate as major studios: developing, producing, marketing, and distributing content simultaneously.

“This expectation of operating as a one person media company is structurally broken and this is why you have 60- 70 percent of content creators that deal with some level of burnout,” says guest and RHEI CEO Shahrzad Rafati, whose company makes agentic AI tools for entertainment. “We prioritize ... keeping the IP owner as part of our journey and protecting their IP, and also offering them a very strong solution,” competing with everything big media delivers. Rafati adds that her AI agents “cater a very personal experience to different audiences, [and] different age groups, across different platforms.”

Of course access to powerful software means little without trusted spaces to test, debate, and demystify its capabilities. Kevin Friel, co-founder of the BC AI Film Club, highlights the indispensable role of local creative communities. Through monthly prompt challenges, sandbox experiments and open critique, this grassroots film club serves as both an innovation lab and an ethical sanity check. “It's a real chance to have a place to show up every month,” says Friel, inviting you to “connect with other creators, often wildly different influences of creators, and really pass tips and tricks and sentiments — just knowing that they're in this creative, wild new frontier together in all of its beauty and craziness all at once.”

Curious to learn more? Check out my first post on the STORYHIVE blog Truth & Consequences: Documentary in the Age of AI — Early Days Meet End Times. 

How to Watch 

You can now watch all episodes of Truth & Consequences: Documentary in the Age of AI on TELUS Optik TV Video on Demand and YouTube. 

And for more on the topic of media innovation, let’s stay connected https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceowarren. 

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Author Bio

FanTrust President Catherine Warren is an international media-tech executive and creative economy strategist, with 25 years at the intersection of innovation, culture, and trust. She has overseen more than $8B in high-impact investment to Canada since 2018 through leadership roles including CEO of the Vancouver Economic Commission, and oversight of the Vancouver Film Commission. Catherine is a co-creator of Canada’s first ethical AI accelerator fund, co-developed a $100M fair-use marketplace for AI training rights, and advises global media companies, governments, and venture partners on AI innovation, monetization, and digital governance. Catherine serves as Canada’s representative on the International Emmy Nominating Committee and as an Adjunct Faculty Fellow at University of Canterbury, serving on the Advisory Board of Kōawa Studios, New Zealand’s production and innovation campus for TV, film, games and emerging tech.