AI, not SI (those initials are reserved for Sports Illustrated) can be a wonderful tool when it comes to creations, it can make the impossible become possible for example, the video game of your dreams can be made by consulting Google AI about coding when a creator cannot do or cannot find the method to do something themselves though the error rate is quite high and so you need to give the AI constant feedback to keep it from being a complete mess.

AI has been used in Star Trek fan films for some time now, early efforts were hard to watch, faces would change during a scene which made watching very distracting and so we did not consider those fan films for The 2026 Trekzone Fan Film Awards.

It is a great temptation to find one of these AI video makers and feed our Axanar or another story of ours into it and see what happens but while the story is ours and the parameters are ours, the visuals would not be ours, we don’t oversee its construction over somebody’s shoulder or by email or instant messaging, we would not get to do long consults with people, the computer does the work and the computer does not fuel the fires of creativity by suggesting different courses of action.

There are so many advantages to AI, people who haven’t had the money or expertise to create something can now do so but there is a cost of the human element, this must be like the late 1920s when hundreds of careers ended when talkies wiped out the silent era of movies or when cartoons started to be changed from hand drawn to digital creation.

Who needs a Ross, a Sam or a Tobias when a computer can do VFX for you, give me a Constitution Class starship, original series era, orbiting a red planet with considerable land masses, give it a registry of 1708, now add a William Shatner from 1969 complete with voice, we’ll say he’s borrowed from the Enterprise and we’re off to the races.

It is not really farfetched, YouTube was running ads featuring Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia and he was spruiking some financial thing, but the thing was that it was not Anthony Albanese, it was a scam, isn’t it weird that YouTube happily runs scam ads? If you weren’t looking closely at the video of him talking, it would have been believable.

The use of Star Trek stars could really open a new can of worms, fan films taken a beating when Axanar got the wrong kind of attention and now the possibility of using likenesses can really blow the roof off of fan films, people have tested the waters of likenesses and have avoided attention but somebody will one day try something monumentally stupid and get the wrong attention.

One comfort is that even with all the AI in the world thrown into a fan film, it will never look like live action, there will always be something that just doesn’t look right.

The last 40 years have seen so much change, the last decade in particular has been full of rapid changes, what will the next couple of years or decades bring, perhaps we’ll soon reach an artificial peak, there will be things that a computer cannot touch and humans will be needed like driving, a computer will never be able to fully anticipate what a human driver will do on the same road or playing sports and so many other things.

So, there is good and there is bad about AI, how good or bad is entirely up to you.