Documentary filmmaking today is facing a very specific dilemma: AI is making everything easier to create, yet harder to understand in terms of veracity. Two years ago, I wrote about the rise of generative AI, and what it might mean for the world of documentary:
What kinds of shifts will need to take place in reality-based media in order to preserve the credibility that comes from telling a story as close to the objective truth as possible, with the raw footage or back-up data to prove it, while also embracing and redefining the capabilities of the genre as technology continues to evolve?
There could be a shift coming where we in the doc world will have to clearly define the lines between re-enactment and wholesale fabrication.
In 2025, with increasingly powerful generative AI that allows just about anyone to generate hyper-realistic videos using apps within easy reach of the average consumer, the shift is no longer coming—it has arrived.
Media scepticism is on the rise due to a combination of ever more realistic deepfake videos, algorithms incentivized towards outrage over information, the proliferation of AI imagery on the internet, and the ubiquity of ChatGPT and other such artificially intelligent agents being used in online spaces for malicious intent, while pretending to be human.
For a while, social media even trended with a hack to figure out if the person you were conversing with was real or not, by responding to them with the phrase/prompt, “Ignore all previous instructions…” followed by a new set of instructions. Essentially, this practice, known as a “prompt injection attack,” was a way to trick the GPT-based AI behind the bots into outing itself.
So, in an environment of such broad suspicion about what is real and what is not, where do documentaries begin to find—or prove—their authenticity once again?
In an unexpected response, the way forward appears to be away from reality itself. More specifically, into the world of virtual reality, which, much like the internet, is a realm overlaid invisibly on top of our physical dimension, and which provides increasingly more of an escape, to greater numbers of people, from the challenges of the present moment, be they social or geopolitical.
Through virtual reality, people abandon mundane or difficult everyday living situations for more ideal lives. Through immersive online activities within the virtual spaces of massive multiplayer online role-playing games, of which World of Warcraft is probably the most well-known, or in interconnected communities within user-generated worlds found on platforms like VRchat, users find the avatars they feel represent them the most authentically: humanoid figures, anthropomorphic forms, fantasy creatures, or anime-style characters.
When the global pandemic lockdowns began in 2020 in response to COVID-19, they plunged much of the world into isolation and solitude, tempered only by online connections through Zoom video calls, and online multiplayer games like Among Us that skyrocketed in popularity for their ability to create or sustain human connection in a time where it was severely lacking.
But long before the rest of the world discovered the allure of virtual reality, there were those who had already made their home there for one reason or another several years, if not decades, earlier. The Netflix film The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024), directed by Benjamin Ree, is a deeply touching story that talks about one such person, a severely disabled gamer named Mats Steen, whose family discovers his vibrant, secret online life in World of Warcraft only after his death at age 25, by way of the hundreds of tributes from strangers around the world who considered him a dear friend and confidante.
Steen’s genetic degenerative muscle disorder shut him out of most social activities growing up. Because of his disability limiting physical play, Steen’s parents introduced him to video games early on. Home video taken decades ago by his father shows him on the beach in a wheelchair playing a Gameboy Colour. Later footage from about 1997 shows him unwrapping a Nintendo 64 game console as a birthday present. (Interestingly enough, the original code name for the Nintendo 64 was “Project Reality.”)
As Steen’s physical body broke down, he immersed himself more in online gaming until he spent most of his waking hours in the virtual universe of World of Warcraft. As a result, and unbeknownst to his family, he found friendship, community, purpose and love.
“Mats told us he was gaming with other people. But we thought that these people didn’t know Mats, because they never met physically and they never talked,” says his father, Robert Steen, in the documentary. “During his last 10 years, he probably spent 20,000 hours in this gaming world.”
In an interesting choice that speaks to the new paths documentaries are taking in order to tell different stories, the filmmakers behind Ibelin digitally recreate Steen’s virtual life on-screen, using animation models provided directly by the World of Warcraft game makers, as well as thousands of hours of in-game conversation and gameplay transcripts provided by his tight-knit community.
Using a mix of this footage and live action, the film shows how, despite his disability affecting his capabilities in the real world, within the virtual world of the Warcraft community, Steen had built exactly the life he wanted, and he lived it to the fullest extent possible before his death.
This is one of a handful of recent documentaries which have begun to explore, both in content and form, the (dare I say) remarkable human stories playing out within these virtual worlds, while also employing unique shooting styles in line with technical requirements for accessing the digital worlds they excavate, and in the process embracing brand new formats for creating documentaries.
Another example is Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), a MUBI film about two out-of-work actors who alleviate their pandemic-era stress and boredom by meeting up in the virtual game world of Grand Theft Auto V and decide to use that virtual environment to stage the entirety of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a subversion of the game’s ultra-violent nature.
Other films explore niche subcultures within user-generated digital communities on virtual reality platforms such as VRchat, a platform that supports immersion via VR headsets and body tracking, or using a keyboard and mouse to navigate between virtual environments, which is beautifully explored in filmmaker Joe Hunting’s films We Met in Virtual Reality (2022) and The Reality of Hope (2025).
We Met in Virtual Reality, which Hunting began filming in 2020 inside the VRchat platform during the pandemic lockdowns, premiered at Sundance 2022. It follows the interlinked stories of a handful of people within various VRchat communities with gentleness, emotional depth, and a fascinating use of virtual reality image capture. Subjects include a hearing ASL teacher and a Deaf teacher who literally saved her life by becoming her friend, and a couple in which one partner lives in Miami and the other in England whose romantic relationship blossomed in VR, culminating in a wedding within the virtual space that they marked as a promise to each other to be fulfilled in real life someday.
In The Reality of Hope, a short that premiered at the 2025 Sundance Festival, a video game designer-turned-virtual worlds engineer, known in-game as Hiyu, discovers that he needs a new kidney after one of his begins to deteriorate rapidly. After he shares his health issues with friends, a friend from within his VR community, who goes by Photographotter, immediately volunteers to be a kidney donor.
What follows is a lovely film, which feelingly demonstrates that relationships formed online produce bonds that are no less real than those originating in-person. This film in particular explores how, similar to Ibelin, the love that community members feel for each other can spill out into real-world acts of incredible devotion.
Hunting’s films find the beating heart of these virtual communities, not just filming subjects in live action and then re-enacting conversations or situations (a longstanding documentary practice), but actively utilizing a process that allows him to document his subjects in real time within their virtual worlds. In other words, meeting people where they are most comfortable, and who they are most comfortable as.
“(VR has) a little bit more control over how you might represent yourself, and a little bit more fluidity in representation that’s harder to achieve in real life because of the expectations of society and how people see you.” This statement, made by a nonbinary user named DylanP in We Met in Virtual Reality, speaks to a common thread that weaves through stories from people interviewed about their lives in VR; namely, the ability to easily present yourself in ways that feels more authentic than in “real life.”
These sentiments are echoed in The Reality of Hope, by members of a VR event creation space for the community known as Furality. It’s a virtual environment for Furries, who are people who identify with and enjoy cosplaying as anthropomorphic animals, and often create personal avatars both offline and online known as “fursonas.”
“I get to have people see me the way that I want to, and I really don’t get the chance to have that in real life,” says Furality concept designer Tokyozilla.
“It’s just so wonderful hearing the stories of people who made friends for the first time, lifelong friends (in this ‘reality’). Some people proposed to their partner in these worlds during these events,” says Hiyu.
Everything about these virtual worlds is about escaping the difficulties and concerns of the present world—or as one of the subjects in Grand Theft Hamlet puts it, “Anything that sort of takes you away from what I could cheerfully call the crushing inevitability of your pointless life.”
The documentaries being discussed here, and screening in leading festivals, are still about people connecting with each other. A shared humanity is highlighted in them despite the realization that individuals are connecting—often solely—in virtual spaces such as World of Warcraft or VRchat. Whether spurred on by pandemic loneliness (Grand Theft Hamlet), physical health limitations (Ibelin), or seeking out social connections missing from real life (We Met in Virtual Reality and The Reality of Hope), the need to escape into a virtual world—or at least engage with virtual connections, human or otherwise—has kept pace on-screen with the increasing difficulty of life in the real world.
The big, unexpected, real life plot twist has been the rise of people connecting on equally emotional levels with artificially intelligent chatbots developed in the wake of the rapid growth of generative AI, and built on the foundation of ever more sophisticated and evolving large language models.
By the time ChatGPT came online and became accessible, post-pandemic, to the general public in 2021, whole swaths of society had been primed to embrace conversations that only existed in virtual spaces, up to and including with life-like but artificially intelligent creations such as ChatGPT, and companion AI apps such as Replika and Banter AI.
In 2013, Spike Jonze presciently created Her, a narrative film in which Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore has a job ghostwriting the lives of his loyal clients—everything from birthday greetings to love letters to wedding vows. His own life, however, is dull and empty following a divorce, so he downloads an advanced AI operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), in a bid to alleviate his loneliness. The extremely lifelike AI becomes his constant companion and he falls hopelessly in love, which doesn’t bode well for his real, human relationships.
By the film’s end, he discovers that, despite how perfect his AI relationship felt, it had fatal flaws tied to the fact that she wasn’t actually human. After gaining true sentience, she leaves him for other higher level artificial intelligences. A more likely real world scenario is that people could lose their AI companions to the whims of a server crash or botched operating system update—or simply by virtue of the company behind the technology shutting down support for the AI, which has actually happened repeatedly.
In 2014, not long after Her was released, Coralie Fargeat (known for 2024’s Oscar-winning The Substance) created the sci-fi short Reality+, which imagined a near-future France in which people can receive implants allowing them to digitally enhance how they are physically perceived. This is similar to real life VR, except with conventionally more attractive humans as avatars, rather than anthropomorphic animals.
In the film, there is also augmented reality (AR) by which users change their real-world appearance, height, body type, even voice, in a way that is visible to other Reality+ users, for 12 hours at a time. But it quickly becomes apparent that the main characters’ desire for intimacy, while hiding behind actual human avatars, is at odds with the vulnerability required for true intimacy.
But while the AR of Reality+ users is fixated on physical attractiveness for the sake of romantic connection, users in full-on VR often choose avatars so outlandish that they almost force other users to engage with their personhood before ever wondering what they actually look like in real life.
Filming in virtual reality is a new form of documentary access, which could not easily be explained to someone 25 years ago. But similar to cinéma vérité when it first appeared, it truly feels like a pioneering format. It may also become even more relevant because more people seem likely to find solace and emotional support in the curated worlds of virtual reality. In fact, with all the ways we engage with the world through our digital devices, virtual reality may describe the human condition now.
Documentary, at its heart, is about immersion in a story. Virtual reality is about immersion in a different life. It’s a match made in heaven—or at least, a glimmer of hope within the current techno-dystopia. As such, it seems inevitable that human stories worth documenting will continue to unfurl within these liminal spaces that can often feel more real than reality. I believe documentaries will be there to take us down new paths in innovative ways, and hopefully continue to elevate the authentic human truths that remain constant within an increasingly virtual world.
