Rajkumar Hirani is bored. Or maybe he’s just tired of the logistical nightmare that comes with Wrangling Bollywood superstars and thousand-person crews in the heat of Mumbai. Either way, the man who gave us the heartwarming tears of Munna Bhai and the satirical bite of PK has decided to trade in his camera for a prompt box.

He’s making a short film. It’s four or five minutes long. It’s built with AI. And he’s calling it a "great tool."

We’ve heard this script before. Every time a legacy director touches a new piece of tech, they describe it like they’ve just discovered fire. They talk about "limitless possibilities" while ignoring the fact that the fire usually ends up burning the house down. Hirani, a filmmaker whose entire brand is built on "jadoo ki jhappis"—magical hugs—is now looking for warmth in a cold set of algorithms.

It’s a weird pivot. Hirani’s films work because they feel lived-in. They’re messy, emotional, and deeply human. AI, at its current stage, is the polar opposite. It’s a statistical average of everything that has already existed. It’s a xerox of a xerox. When Hirani says AI is a tool, he’s right in the most literal, boring sense. A hammer is a tool. A chainsaw is a tool. But if you try to perform surgery with a chainsaw, you don't get a patient; you get a mess.

The friction here isn't just about the "soul" of cinema. That’s an abstract argument for film students. The real friction is practical. Generating a consistent four-minute narrative in AI right now is a nightmare of flickering frames and melting limbs. To get a single character to look the same in shot A and shot B requires a level of "prompt engineering" that makes actual directing look like a vacation. You aren't directing a performance; you’re fighting a slot machine.

Then there’s the cost. Not the marketing budget, but the compute. To render five minutes of high-fidelity AI video that doesn’t look like a fever dream requires a farm of H100 GPUs that could power a small village. Hirani might save money on catering and vanity vans, but he’ll be cutting checks to Nvidia instead of junior artists. It’s a trade-off that feels particularly cynical in an industry that already treats its below-the-line workers like disposable assets.

Why do it? To stay relevant. To show the kids he can still play with the new toys. But there’s a risk that in chasing the tech, he loses the one thing that made people sit in sticky theater seats for three hours: the human spark.

If you ask an AI to write a Rajkumar Hirani scene, it will give you a montage of people laughing through tears, a quirky social message, and a catchy song. It will look like a Hirani film. It will sound like a Hirani film. But it’ll be a hollowed-out version of it. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a lab-grown burger. It has the protein, the fat, and the color, but you know something is off the moment you take a bite.

Hirani isn't the first to jump into this pool, and he won’t be the last. Hollywood is already waist-deep in the stuff, trying to figure out how to de-age actors without making them look like wax figures from a haunted museum. But seeing the king of Indian feel-good cinema embrace the "prompt" feels like a surrender. It’s an admission that the craft of physical filmmaking—the sweat, the bad weather, the happy accidents on set—is becoming a burden too heavy to carry.

He says it’s a tool. Fine. But tools usually exist to help you build something that didn't exist before. Right now, AI is mostly being used to recreate things we’ve already seen, just faster and cheaper. It’s a shortcut to a destination we’ve already visited.

The industry is watching. If Hirani can make a five-minute short that doesn't make our skin crawl, the floodgates will open. Every studio head from Mumbai to Burbank will see it as a green light to trim the "excess" of human labor. They’ll see a way to get the "Hirani touch" without the Hirani price tag.

Will the audience care? Probably not at first. We’re already used to CGI that looks like plastic and scripts that feel like they were written by a committee of bots. But eventually, the novelty wears off. Eventually, you realize you’re watching a movie made by a machine that doesn't know what a hug actually feels like.

Is a "great tool" really worth it if it eventually replaces the hand that holds it?