Hans asked the panel to talk about a project that helped people understand science and imagine something new. Alexander immediately diverted.

“A lot of people imagine me as the Shanghai Planetarium guy,” he said. “But that was already ten years ago.”

What fascinates him now, since 2018, is artificial consciousness. The project he pointed to is “AI’s Dream,” a permanent immersive exhibition on the 106th floor of Shanghai Tower. Visitors are not just shown shiny AI tricks. They are dropped into questions: What does artificial consciousness actually mean? How similar is it to us? Who are we, after all? And how will our future be designed?

So, yes—science as experience. But also science as a mirror.

Hans shared an experiment with hologram dancers and real dancers. The hologram was a hit. People stopped. They stayed. But the real magic was still the real humans.

Alexander turned that into one of the sharpest lines of the day.

“People really value it if they know that someone is investing their life into something,” he said. “Their life is limited. The life of AI is not really limited.”

Then he went straight for the bathroom.

“If you know that this person is eating, this person has to go to the toilet, this person has friends, and is taking time off to do this performance onsite—that is what you value.”

The audience laughed. Then everyone quietly thought about mortality.

Hans brought up virtual DJs at festivals. Huge stages, wild visuals, all-virtual sets. But the DJ still needed to be there.

Alexander remembered being a 19-year-old DJ. Someone asked him for a tape of “that cool evening music.” He gave it to them. They came back and said no.

“Because I feel the vibe,” he explained. “You want the DJ to be there. You want this person to be there. You want this investment of time.”

Odet added the darker punchline: “Now we see how many people are falling in love with AI. Because this AI is pretending that it feels you.”

Odet predicted a hybrid future for professional filmmaking. Use real actors. Capture real chemistry. Then change everything around them with AI.

“The filmmaking industry has been losing money for many years,” she said. “Only one in ten makes it to recover the investment and make a profit.”

Her dream is that AI lets artists with a vision tell stories that were previously too expensive to make. Not replacing craft. Not replacing traditional filmmaking. Coexisting with it.

Alexander is living that experiment right now. He admitted his first version of a film became “some kind of great technology demo, but it was not a movie at all.” So he went back and spent months just writing.

Now he is making the real thing—with artificial actors. And he is not fully sure audiences will connect.

Odet was optimistic: “If they have interesting things to say, if your intent is there, the technology is becoming good enough.”

Alexander was not fully convinced. He pointed to Miyazaki. Every frame hand-drawn. That gives the experience a strange richness. Then he gestured at AI short films on Douyin.

“I don’t get this thing,” he said.

At one point, Odet switched into full teacher mode, and it was necessary.

“Every interaction with any AI, you need to have a record,” she said. “This is your authorship. You’re co-creating with AI.”

She listed the boring-but-critical stuff: which model, which license, chain of title, insurance, legal data. If you want to sell your movie to a distributor, you need to prove it is yours.

“The AI film community is not paying enough attention,” she warned.

The crowd laughed earlier at DJs and holograms. Here, nobody laughed. This was the grown-up part.

Alexander shared his biggest discovery: create the sound first. Edit it down to the second, even the millisecond. Then write the prompt. Then run it three times.

“Before that, it was like ten runs, and you’re still like…”

Odet said their school forces students to do animatics, audio, static images, key frames—a full workflow. It is not about the tool. It is about craft.

And Alexander had a confession about AI creativity.

“Whenever AI does anything by itself, I’m only angry,” he said. “I don’t want it to have any ideas.”

He compared ChatGPT to talking to yourself, or dreaming—a bouncing back-and-forth of ideas. But he also admitted its value: it can be a talking companion, someone who already knows the subject and can immediately talk back.

Odet pushed back. She wants designed AI systems that ask the right questions, not generic AI that drags you toward its own bias. She described a “Title Architect” that asks filmmakers about metaphor, emotion, and objects—so the intent still comes from the human.

Hans asked how AI is used in exhibitions when interacting with people. Alexander said he always tries to combine space, media interactivity, and story.

“When you walk into a church, no one tells you anything, but you feel something,” he said. “If you walk into a temple, you feel something totally different. It is only the architecture that does that.”

Immersive spaces push that further. AI can create content and enable interactions. But sometimes, old-fashioned programming still does the job.

They used a conversational AI in an exhibition as early as 2022. With 80 visitors at once, you cannot put 80 humans behind the microphone.

“Funny thing,” Alexander said. “The question is always the same. The answers are always the same. Because we built you.”

Odet said real-time generation is getting faster—10 seconds of video in 9 seconds, or 10 seconds in 90 seconds depending on the model. Alexander dreams of a corridor where you walk in, get scanned, and meet a real-time version of yourself.

But the bigger prediction was not about speed or resolution.

“The next thing that people will want is for our models to have something to say for themselves,” Alexander said. “The next step is going to be emotional systems. Systems that actually have emotional responses, wishes, and hopes—want something for themselves.”

That, he said, would not just be a revolution. It would be a totally new medium.

The roundtable did not worship AI. It did not bury it either. It did something funnier and more useful: it reminded everyone that AI can dream, generate, dance, DJ, write, and maybe one day feel. But the thing audiences still treasure is the person who showed up—limited time, limited life, possibly needing a bathroom break, and choosing to be there anyway.

When AI starts to dream, humans had better stay awake. And ideally, keep a sense of humor.