Mallal says he wants to see a "broadly accessible and easy-to-use programme where artists are compensated for their work". Beeban Kidron, a cross-bench peer and leading campaigner against the government proposals, says AI film-making tools are "fantastic" but "at what point are they going to realise that these tools are literally built on the work of creators?" She adds: "Creators need equity in the new system or we lose something precious." YouTube says its terms and conditions allow Google to use creators' work for making AI models – and denies that all of YouTube's inventory has been used to train its models. Mallal calls his use of AI to make films "prompt craft", a phrase that uses the term for giving instructions to AI systems. When making the Ukraine film, he says he was amazed at how quickly a camera angle or lighting tone could be adjusted with a few taps on a keyboard.

For years, dual roles have been played largely for laughs. Think of Adam Sandler's Razzie-sweeping twin turn in Jack and Jill, or Lisa Kudrow as both Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on Friends. Eddie Murphy was always particularly prolific, his most multiplicitous performance as a clutch of Klumps for Nutty Professor II. There are exceptions, of course. But for every Legend or The Prestige there are ten Austin Powers, Bowfingers and – shudder – Norbits.

The first piece of AI-generated video I ever made moved me to tears – tears of laughter. Given the chance to fool around with Runway AI's Gen-3 Alpha, I dropped in an image of an eagle carrying off a wolf. Moments later, the picture sprang into life. Except the bird only had one leg – and its plummeting prey sprouted wings from its tail and morphed into a wolf-headed goose. It was weird and hilarious.

Lionsgate has signed a deal with the artificial intelligence research firm Runway, allowing it access to the company's large film and TV library to train a new generative model. According to the Wall Street Journal, the model will be "customized to Lionsgate's proprietary portfolio" which includes hit franchises such as John Wick, Saw and The Hunger Games. The aim is to help film-makers and other creatives "augment their work" through the use of AI. "Runway is a visionary, best-in-class partner who will help us utilize AI to develop cutting-edge, capital-efficient content creation opportunities," said Michael Burns, Lionsgate's vice-chair. "Several of our film-makers are already excited about its potential applications to their pre-production and post-production process. We view AI as a great tool for augmenting, enhancing and supplementing our current operations."

Before bashing out emails and text messages by thumb became an accepted form of communication, typing was a fully manual skill. In the 80s, "the office" was an exclusive preserve for freaks who could type 40 words per minute at least. Those too modest or miserly to sign up for brick-and-mortar classes could pick up a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for 50. At my Catholic high school, the application was the typing class. The priests just switched on the computers.

Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage of images for a barely photographed 19th-century woman by using AI to generate what looked like old photos. Which brought up the question: should they? And if they did, what sort of transparency is required? The capability and availability of generative AI – the type that can produce text, images and video – have changed so rapidly, and the conversations around it have been so fraught, that film-makers' ability to use it far outpaces any consensus on how.

Code streams across a computer screen; hackers bark at each other in techno-jargon and hammer at keyboards; the real world seamlessly shifts into the virtual, and back again. This is the sort of scene that is instantly recognisable as a cyberpunk film, the subgenre of sci-fi that meshes together technology and counterculture – of which Ghost in the Shell, the live-action remake of the Japanese anime classic, is the latest high-profile example. It is little surprise that cyberpunk has proved irresistible for many film-makers over the decades since the term was coined, by the author Bruce Bethke, in the early 1980s. With its visions of postapocalyptic futures, advanced technologies and virtual realms, they get to pack their films with visual effects to sweeten the (red) pill, while wrestling with weighty existential themes. Yet, for all its enduring popularity – which owes so much to Ridley Scott's 1982 classic Blade Runner – cyberpunk has often proved a tough nut to crack on the big screen.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and RoboCop to The Matrix, how humans deal with the artifical intelligence they have created has proved a fertile dystopian territory for film-makers. More recently Spike Jonze's Her and Alex Garland's forthcoming Ex Machina explore what it might be like to have AI creations living among us and, as Alan Turing's famous test foregrounded, how tricky it might be to tell the flesh and blood from the chips and code. These concerns are even troubling some of Silicon Valley's biggest names: last month Telsa's Elon Musk described AI as mankind's "biggest existential threat… we need to be very careful". What many of us don't realise is that AI isn't some far-off technology that only exists in film-maker's imaginations and computer scientist's labs. Many of our smartphones employ rudimentary AI techniques to translate languages or answer our queries, while video games employ AI to generate complex, ever-changing gaming scenarios.