Epistemological Distrust in the Age of AI: the case of documentary cinema

(In press)

The emerging technical possibilities of digital cinema — namely CGI and, more recently, deepfakes and generative AI — compel us to revisit the classical question of realism in cinema, particularly the realism of documentary film. Within this new technological framework, the ontological specificity of the documentary demands renewed ethical and aesthetic consideration.
The ethical problem of documentary filmmaking largely overlaps with the theoretical challenge of defining the particular form of realism that sustains it. The advent of generative AI, by enabling the creation of hyperrealistic images indistinguishable from reality, strengthens perceptual realism (verisimilitude) while simultaneously undermining its epistemological dimension, making the authenticity of images increasingly difficult to verify – and that difficulty also constitutes an ethical problem.
Drawing on this framework, the present paper proposes a three-level typology of epistemological distrust: distrust regarding veracity (the discursive level), regarding indexicality (the ontological level), and regarding authorship (the level of human certification).
One of the conclusions put forward is that the ethical questioning of documentary film is inseparable from the theoretical problem of its delimitation as a genre. Describing the particular type of realism that governs the documentary is essentially the same as describing its ethical foundations. And this becomes more manifest in the age of AI.