In the opening scenes of the Amazon Prime series House of David season 2, right after the iconic David takes down Goliath with a well-aimed stone, chaos unfolds around him. Dust clouds drift over crowds of men battling in the desert, clashing swords, some on horseback. With a few costume changes, this could easily be mistaken for a scene from Game of Thrones or Dune. However, showrunner Jon Erwin reveals that he didn’t have the budget for a grand spectacle—he turned to AI instead.
“The entire shot is done using these tools, virtually,” Erwin explains to WIRED. “And enhancing those shots costs a fraction of what it would have taken to create them with traditional VFX methods.”
Erwin’s faith-based production company, the Wonder Project, shared nearly two dozen images of what they describe as “mostly AI-generated scenes” from House of David season 2. They report using more than four times the AI shots compared to the first season—jumping from over 70 shots in season 1 to around 350 to 400 shots in season 2. This latest season portrays the rise of King David of Israel in 1000 BCE.
Many images showcase crowds in battle, but AI was also employed for visuals of stone fortresses, hillsides ablaze, and heroes surveying misty landscapes from mountain tops. Unlike the awkward, obvious AI outputs of recent years, these images seem convincingly realistic.
“If we only have the budget for a certain scale,” Erwin notes, “we can put a real camera on a real actor and direct them, which becomes essentially the hand inside a puppet. The puppet is the digital world you create.”
Erwin’s take on “magical” AI filmmaking diverges significantly from the views of many Hollywood figures and audiences. Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro warned that he hopes to “die before AI art goes mainstream,” comparing tech enthusiasts to Victor Frankenstein. Broadway star Ariana Grande expressed her desire to never see another AI-generated image again. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is bracing for backlash against its second annual AI-generated holiday ad, drawing viral reactions like, “Biggest company in the world proudly admitting to accelerating the apocalypse and asking ‘what are you going to do about it?’”
However, Coca-Cola execs and enthusiasts like Erwin argue that the most vocal critics represent a dwindling minority. The founder of the AI company behind the Coke ad claimed in Hollywood Reporter that the dissenters are mainly creatives “afraid for their jobs” rather than “average people.” In a sign of the industry’s shift, AI companies such as Runway have struck deals with major studios like Lionsgate to develop custom AI tools based on their archives. Erwin has utilized Runway’s “image to video” capabilities, as well as modification tools from Luma and products from Google and Adobe.
