Podcasts · Possible with Reid Hoffman

The film director winning awards with AI | Ben Hansford

15 Jul 2026 · 35 min

Commercial director, AI filmmaker, and USC professor Ben Hansford joins Reid Hoffman and Parth Patil to explain how AI is reshaping Hollywood, film production, VFX, and comics.

Ben has been experimenting with generative AI since before DALL-E and Midjourney went mainstream, using the earliest tools to sharpen commercial treatments, win jobs, and teach one of the country's first AI film courses. He traces Hollywood's arc from student protests and industry resistance to a scramble for answers, as shrinking budgets and shifting audiences push creators toward new workflows.

He also recounts how a 30-minute AI VFX test reset his sense of what a director can prototype, and why he's building BloqBloq around a stark creative bottleneck: as he puts it, there are more NBA players than professional comic book illustrators. He maps the "iceberg" of creation, from databases and security to publishing and iteration, and explains why turning an idea into a finished product takes more than a prompt. For Ben, AI isn't just a tool. It's a crew.

For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/