As debates over AI’s role in creative work intensify, the second annual Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF) is betting that filmmakers don’t have to choose between human creativity and artificial intelligence. The festival — now in its second year — returns this month with 200 films that explore what happens when filmmakers say yes to both.

Held at Seattle’s McCaw Hall from Aug. 29 to 30, the festival wants to cement the city’s status as an AI film hub, dispel doubts about the medium’s capabilities and showcase what the tools can enable when guided by passionate filmmakers.

“We launched an AI film festival here because there’s world class AI, a large and largely quiet creative economy, and the ability to develop a cultural scene that’s simultaneously distinct but globally relevant,” says John Gauntt, the festival’s creative director.

By championing AI as part of the creative workflow, the festival hopes to broaden access to the rarefied visual language of cinema while keeping storytelling and creative direction in human hands. Gauntt says they are on a mission to help “human creators tell better stories,” while also recognizing the ability to “create cinematic content under radically different economics, timescales and formal expertise.”

The event will show select films that use generative AI for animation, visual effects, editing, and sound design, and feature panels from film creators and industry experts.

Featured trailers highlight offerings that flex directors’ creative muscles:

• La Pornographe from Canada shows experimental O’Keefe-like dreamscapes of dew-soaked flowers.
• Half Psychopath from Korea is a high-energy action thriller.

Submissions come from 34 countries. South Korea alone accounted for 23 of the films submitted, with others coming from Kazakhstan, India, Iran, and Argentina. But hosting in Seattle was an obvious choice for organizers.

“When I’m outside this bubble and say ‘Seattle AI Film Festival’ —  it makes sense to people. Like Milwaukee and beer make sense,” Gauntt quips.

The festival also aims to strengthen the relationship between the city’s strong tech ecosystem and its creative economy.

Gauntt also emphasized that the event would steer away from slop. AI filmmaking backlash, he said, is “real with some valid points,” but it’s largely driven by fear, uncertainty and doubt. 

“This has cast Generative AI as poster child/punching bag for the general pace of change in creative industries which is a proxy for the rest of the economy and society,” Gauntt tells GeekWire. “So our value to attendees is partial immunization to AI FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) combined with being on the ground floor of a rapidly evolving global scene.”

By seeing that the cutting edge of AI filmmaking can avoid the genre’s tropes — of plasticky AI aesthetics, short-form snippets, and “In a dystopian cyberpunk world run by killer robots…” narratives, Gauntt said attendees could be “immunized” against sweeping negative generalizations.

Attendees will instead be greeted with creative and careful use of AI, he said. He pointed to longer films, between 15 and 30 minutes, more natural dialogue, and improved visual consistency as evidence.

The scale of the festival has evolved from its guerrilla origins. Organizers anticipate up to 500 attendees across the event’s two days, a jump from last year’s 110. 

Beyond screenings, the festival offers panels and workshops for creators to share generative AI techniques and connect with tech sponsors and production studios. Attendees can demo AI filmmaking tools to see under the hood how the films are generated.

Alongside the festival, the team is launching its Creative AI Accelerator, a program to train 30-50 Seattle creators to use AI in their workflows. The program, in partnership with other national and global AI film organizations, wants to establish a network of AI creators to collaborate on projects and reach global audiences, furthering growth in a field the team has already seen rapid improvement.

Tickets are available on Luma and start at $25 for single-day passes. Full weekend passes are available for attendees looking to catch the complete lineup of screenings, workshops and networking sessions.

Here’s a look at The Cinema That Never Was from Germany, which considers the films that never left writers’ imaginations.

Attending as many Seattle Tech Week events as possible and talking with as many people as I could, I was struck by the number of people looking for work and the volume of visitors from the Bay Area, including a number of investors looking to get a sense for what the regional tech scene is about.

It was hard not to imagine them being impressed with the sheer level of engagement and enthusiasm, even if they didn’t happen to catch Jacob Colker’s rallying cry. With more than 250 events (and waiting lists for many of them) it was more than any one person could take in.

It wasn’t Seattle AI Week — that’s still to come in October — but given the moment in tech and the world, the topic of artificial intelligence was naturally the main throughline of the week.

A panel that changed my perspective was early in the week, called “Foundation Models Go Vertical,” hosted by the Seattle pre-seed firm Ascend at Washington 1000 downtown. Founding general partner Kirby Winfield told the room that 600 people had tried to get in.

One of the biggest insights was from Manos Koukoumidis, CEO of Kirkland-based Oumi and a former Google Cloud AI engineering manager who led large language model efforts there.

Companies that are racing to build on top of the frontier models, he said, are renting a kind of intelligence that has very little to do with their own businesses.

“Enterprises are using a model that is trained on 5% of the world’s data that sits on the web, not the other 95%,” he said, referring to the data sitting inside their own organizations.

Which led him to the question (and the point) that I keep coming back to: If the intelligence at the center of the product belongs to someone else, he asked, “are you really an AI company, or an application company on top of somebody else’s intelligence?”

The next day, in the audience for a recording of the Founded & Funded podcast by Seattle Tech Week organizer Madrona, I posed the question that we debated on last week’s episode of our GeekWire Podcast: what should Seattle founders and investors make of venture numbers that rank Philadelphia, Austin, and New York ahead of them?

It was the right place to ask, given that the show featured Nizar Tarhuni, EVP for research and market intelligence at PitchBook, which tracks the numbers, and Madrona partner Sabrina Albert.

Albert pointed out that the numbers don’t capture everything. A company can have a big engineering group in Seattle, or even a co-founder here, and still be counted as a Bay Area company, she said. Large engineering offices for OpenAI and Anthropic are the latest examples.

Tarhuni made a similar point: “There’s so much talent in some of the biggest unicorns that are actually working out of Seattle,” he said. In terms of overall economic activity, he added, “there’s a lot more here that doesn’t make its way into those numbers.”

Other quotes and insights that stood out from the sessions we attended:

Patrick Thompson, CEO of Seattle-based Clarify, said his company’s Anthropic bill had tripled in three months. He has shifted spending to AWS Bedrock, citing reliability problems, and now runs smaller models locally on his own laptop for low-level work.

Madrona’s Albert, on the shift to selling outcomes: “Before, when you were thinking about traditional software, you would charge for a seat or a unit of software. But now you can really fundamentally change it. … If I deliver this outcome for you, then you can actually pay me for it.”

Ken Horenstein, founder of Pack Ventures, which invests in startups tied to the University of Washington, on the knock that Seattle is slow: research institutions here are “choosing problems that are 10, 15, 20, 50-year problems,” he said. “Sometimes people put that as a negative rap on us because we don’t go really fast and flame really bright like you might see in other markets. But I actually think that can be used as a benefit.”

Ben Gaffney, deputy general counsel at OpenAI, on the notion that AI is thinning out headcount: “Even within the legal team that I work in, we need more people. Even though we’re getting all these massive productivity gains, it isn’t like you don’t need people to supervise this stuff.”

Brian Hall, the longtime Microsoft, AWS and Google executive who became chief marketing officer at Mistral AI in June, on where this all ends up: “We’re gonna laugh when we thought that AI was gonna save us time.”

Ascend’s Winfield, on the limits of what investors provide: “If I invested in you, it’s not because I’m smart about your market. It’s because you’re smart about your market. … If you’re looking for answers from your investors, you’re in trouble.”

Karl Siebrecht, co-founder and CEO of Flexe, at a networking event, telling founders to stop networking: “Spending time as a founder trying to market yourself to investors, I think, is a fallacy. If you focus on building a valuable company … I can promise you, investors will find you.”

Molly Klein, founder and CEO of Perk Events, who runs some of GeekWire’s biggest events, on why any of this happens in the first place: “Events are hands-down the strongest business development tool that you have,” she said. “One conversation may take six emails in three weeks. At an event, it happens in 10 minutes, because you’re getting that face-to-face time.”

That pretty much summed up the week.

It’s time to recognize the Seattle area’s boldest innovators. Nominations are now open for GeekWire’s 2026 Uncommon Thinkers Awards.

Now in its fourth year, and in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners, the program aims to honor inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs who are transforming industries and driving positive change throughout the world.

Community nominations will be accepted through Sept. 18 at 11 a.m. PT, after which a panel of judges will select honorees. They’ll be celebrated on stage during a VIP reception at the annual GeekWire Gala on Dec. 10.

Honorees are selected based on innovation, creativity and leadership and should have a track record of introducing novel ideas, technologies, or solutions that challenge the status quo. Nominees should also demonstrate a measurable and meaningful impact on their respective fields or industries, contributing to the betterment of society.

Do you know an Uncommon Thinker deserving of recognition? Fill out the nomination form today.

Read the GeekWire profiles of last year’s Uncommon Thinkers honorees:

• Anindya Roy’s journey from rural India to turning science fiction into drug candidates
• Chet Kittleson’s Tin Can is a calling, and a way to foster deeper connections for kids
• Brian Pinkard looks for impact, from flipping rocks to destroying forever chemicals
• Portal Space’s Jeff Thornburg plans to harness the heat of the sun in the cold of space
• Kiana Ehsani thrives on scrappy persistence at AI startup Vercept and in the outdoors
• Bluesky’s Jay Graber is planting the seeds for a decentralized digital world

Thanks to First Tech Federal Credit Union, the title sponsor of this year’s GeekWire Gala. For a recap of last year’s event, head here.