Kevin Hart’s production company, Hartbeat, is stepping into the AI arena with a bold new experiment in creativity. The company has partnered with Luma AI for Prompt Side Story—a “live AI film battle” that will pit comedians and content creators against each other to make short films in real time using AI tools. Deadline exclusively reports.
Described as a “first-of-its-kind event,” Prompt Side Story will unfold this weekend in front of a live audience at LA Tech Week. The event will be hosted by comedian and TIME 100 AI Storyteller King Willonius (Will Hatcher), who will guide five teams of comedians and creators through a timed creative showdown. Each team will receive AI-generated prompts and race against the clock to turn them into fully realized short films.
A panel of judges will select the winning project, awarding a cash prize, while all five finished shorts will debut on Hartbeat’s LOL Network.
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The contestants, who have not yet been announced, will use Luma’s Dream Machine and Ray3 technology to build their short films from scratch. Dream Machine is described as a “video generation tool that transforms text and image prompts into cinematic scenes.” Meanwhile, Ray3 is a multimodal reasoning model—a system designed to think visually, plan complex sequences, and critique its own output, created in collaboration with filmmakers, advertisers, and game developers.
My Take
Hartbeat’s move here is interesting. By partnering with Luma Ai they are showing in real time just how fast AI is reshaping storytelling, and how easy it’s becoming for anyone with an idea to create something cinematic.
But while this innovation is exciting, it’s also layered. The danger isn’t just digital—it’s physical. The infrastructure needed to power AI is expanding faster than our ethical frameworks around it. Data centers are being built everywhere to support this technology, and that growth comes with real environmental costs—massive water and energy consumption that often impacts marginalized and rural communities first.
So yes, this partnership is innovative and it’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. But as we embrace AI’s creative potential, we also have to stay mindful of the ecosystems—both human and environmental—that are sustaining it.
AI isn’t going away. And whether we love it or fear it, learning how to use it—and how to hold it accountable—is how we stay in the game.