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Autodesk's own AI film has a continuity error nobody could prompt away

by · Creative Bloq

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Autodesk's own AI demo film Robots of the Wild West, shown at Autodesk University 2026, has a continuity error, and the company knows exactly where it is. A character sits down next to another at a table; a shot or two later, he's across the corner from her. Maurice Patel, Autodesk's VP of M&E Industry Strategy, brought it up himself when we spoke at AU26 in Las Vegas, in the calm after the keynotes. His team tried to prompt the problem away and couldn't. Starting again would have cost more than a demo warranted, so they left it in.

AU26 has been dominated by Autodesk's argument that AI should help artists, not replace them, with Flow Studio as the flagship and tools like MotionMaker arriving inside Maya. The table is where I started.

AI's happy accident bonus

"AI is great at serendipitous content and is terrible at directed content," Patel says. He sorts it into tasks, shots and worlds. MotionMaker is a task: a small model trained to do one thing well, now covering locomotion for humans, dogs and horses, with cats on the way. The demo film is shots, which is where generative video sits today. Worlds that persist and understand physics are "the holy grail" and still far off, and he says the idea of prompting a whole movie is a myth.

The table problem is what shots look like at scale. Run the same prompt twice and "I'm probably going to get something slightly different." Change one thing, and the model can change others you liked; Patel says the models can also get stuck, reproducing the same result no matter how you rephrase, and when that happens, the only way out is back to the beginning.

So the aim is never to go back to the beginning. Use AI to make a 2D image, use that to make a 3D scene, use that to feed a clip, and you can return to any stage. Flow Studio's 3D Editor + Canvas works on a related principle, letting you block cameras, characters and performance in 3D before the AI generates the final look.

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"We fundamentally believe that the future of AI is orchestration," Patel says. "We don't believe there's going to be one model to rule them all, even though that's what they might be trying to do", a slight dig at how some AI platforms view their place and goals. He expects real footage, CG and AI to be mixed, sometimes for efficiency alone. "Sometimes it's just quicker to shoot a fire and use that," he laughs, gesturing.

Live on stage at AU26, Flow Studio was demoed to create an animated short using AI and traditional Maya animation.(Image credit: Autodesk)

When the flaws are the point

Short clips are getting hard to tell from the real thing in AI film, showing where the tech sits right now in terms of quality and use. "We sometimes forget people used to do bad visual effects," Patel reflects, and AI tends to break down over longer stretches, suggesting that everything often starts from flawed beginnings.

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But quality isn't always what an AI project is for, as in Patel's view, the Coca-Cola Christmas AI ad was "full of flaws" creatively, and its notoriety as AI helped sell it. He describes a credit card ad where the AI got the logo wrong, and the text was unreadable, something a VFX vendor would have rejected outright back in his day when he worked in visual effects. As he tells it, the fact that these ads were made with AI mattered more than the quality.

But sometimes AI in film can do things never before possible. Patel cites Dreams of Violets as a case where AI let a filmmaker tell a story he couldn't shoot, in this case in Iran, where director Ash Koosha would be arrested on arrival. He's sceptical of the roughly $2,000 price tag said to have been needed to make the film. He hasn't spoken to the director, but Koosha's an AI engineer, and Patel suspects the only way that budget works is free compute from his own company. Prompts on a feature-length project, he says, can run into the hundreds of thousands.

It's "a very real cost to this", admits Patel. If you don't care about the content, he says, you can do something quickly and cheaply and "you get AI slop, essentially."

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The cost problem he cares about more is the industry's. Games that cost $15–20m to make now run to $200m, which he thinks pushes studios towards sequels and reboots – safe options that iron out any invention or gamble. He points to low-budget horror films from A24 and Blumhouse – Backrooms and Obsession – as proof audiences want something different, and hopes that lower costs mean more variety. It's close to what Diana Colella told me about AI bringing in more creators.

Robots of the Wild West, an AI-made animation demo created live at AU26 had 'continuity errors', proving why humans are still needed.(Image credit: Autodesk)

A million rabbits

For context, Patel's first job in the industry was training people in digital compositing using Avid, when computers were new. Roto artists and optical compositors had to learn their trade in a completely new way. Asked whether AI is replacing jobs or changing them, he doesn't pick one: "It's replacing jobs. It's changing jobs. It's allowing people to enter who would never have been able to enter before." Digital effects, he notes, turned a niche cottage industry into one employing hundreds of thousands of people.

What he says next comes from experience, not principle. "Everything I've experienced with AI, including doing the AI work for this [Robots of the Wild West]," he says, is that "you still need artists who have a vision, who drive this AI, because the AI itself is actually terrible." He means it as a description of steering a model toward something specific, not as a verdict on the technology. It's the same critique as the table in the demo film, from a man whose company makes the tools, because, as he says, we're so early in the AI journey, nothing is yet perfect.

He reflects on the animator's role specifically when it comes to AI use. "The art of an animator isn't knowing how to use animation curves," he says. "The art of an animator is understanding how to make the performance shine."

Cel tracing, curves and prompts are just ways of getting there. A model could train on a million rabbits, he says, and never produce Bugs Bunny, because nothing in the real world tells you Bugs should move like that, act like that; it's human imagination. It's "a pure artist thing," he says, reflecting that he doesn't expect this process to be autonomous anytime soon.

Is he enjoying any of it? "It's a love-hate thing," Patel admits. He was the CG expert once. Now, he says, he's "a newbie", and it's "scary, but it's also kind of fun."