I'll be honest with you. When Scott and Nick first walked me through the AI filmmaking platform Flawless was building, I thought they were a little crazy.
Thirty-plus models. Clean data. A massive team of scientists, filmmakers, and engineers. A process that was expensive and painstaking. An obsessive attention to cinematic-quality output and bank-level data security.
I've spent my career building and scaling technology companies, and I know what investors want to hear. This wasn't it.
It was 2023. OpenAI had just launched ChatGPT to a stunned world. TechCrunch was running headlines like "VCs continue to pour dollars into generative AI." Every investor in the valley was chasing the same bet, and the prevailing belief – loud, confident, and mostly wrong – was that you'd eventually just prompt a movie. Type a few lines, hit generate, collect your Oscar. Against that backdrop, what Nick and Scott were building looked stubborn at best.
But the more time I spent with them, the more I understood: they weren't being stubborn. They could see what others missed. They knew that great film and television isn't a pattern to be optimized. It's crafted by artists making thousands of creative decisions under pressure. They knew you could never remove the human from that process and expect anything worth watching to come out the other side. They were doing AI right.
Flawless Co-CEO Amit Kapur appeared in our latest episode of Flawless Voices.
I started as an advisor, then joined the board – and the more time went by, the more involved I got.
I watched Scott, Nick and the team build tools that filmmakers actually wanted to use – not because they had no choice, but because the outputs were good enough for the most demanding creative work on the planet.
I watched them sit down with SAG-AFTRA and other guilds and treat them not as adversaries to be managed, but as partners to be earned.
And I watched Nick and Scott turn down shortcuts that most companies would have jumped on.
Two years later, I'm all in.
What drew me here – and what I believe this industry needs to hear clearly right now – is a distinction that I think gets lost in all the noise around AI: the difference between technology that replaces human creativity and technology that amplifies it.
At a recent conference with the Advanced Imaging Society – a group of top tech leaders from across the entertainment industry we were invited to join – someone used a phrase that stopped us all in our tracks: assistive AI.
It landed because it named exactly what we'd been trying to build and struggling to articulate.
Generative AI produces synthetic outputs, trained on material that artists never consented to. It doesn't create from nothing – it samples, synthesizes, and reproduces the trillions of dollars of studio investment and the performances of millions of credited artists who agreed to work on specific projects, not to fuel a model. That's not creativity. That's theft. And we're already seeing the sheen come off – the lawsuits are mounting, and the huge VC bets on generative AI products are quietly unwinding. The tools gaining ground now are the quiet ones – built to serve creativity without harming it.
What Flawless builds is different at its foundation. Our tools modify human-created assets. They expand what an editor can do in the room, what a dubbing actor can achieve, what a director can fix or reimagine in post. The outputs are copyrightable. The consent flows are built in. The artists remain in control.
Coming from tech, I believe deeply in what technology can do. But I also spent enough time early in my career at Universal Pictures to understand something that pure technologists sometimes miss: this industry runs on trust, on craft, on relationships built over decades. You can't shortcut your way into this world. You earn it, or you don't get in.
The films and shows that move people – that actually get made, distributed, and remembered – are the result of thousands of creative decisions, technical judgements, and collaborative relationships. That doesn't come from a model. It comes from people who have spent careers developing taste, craft, and the ability to work with other talented people under pressure.
What technology can do is give those people better tools.
What excites me most about this moment in AI filmmaking – and I mean genuinely, not in a press release way – is the possibility on the other side of getting this right.
Film and television have been contracting. Fewer productions, tighter budgets, more constraints on the creative people who make the work everyone actually wants to watch.
If we do this well, assistive AI doesn't just improve a workflow here and there. It changes the economics of the whole thing. More stories get made. More of them reach global audiences. Filmmakers who couldn’t get projects financed at today’s costs will find a path. Productions that would never have crossed language barriers now can.
We believe these are the conditions for a renaissance in global filmmaking. And that it’s closer than most people think.
Together, we will continue working to change film for the better.
Amit Kapur is co-CEO of Flawless alongside co-founder and filmmaker Scott Mann. His appointment, announced in Variety earlier this year, follows two years advising and serving on the company's board.