Generative AI and the "Synthetic Archive": How the Role of the Director-Interpreter is Changing and How Trust in Documentary Facts is Being Affected

The article is oriented toward a comprehensive analysis of how generative artificial intelligence is transforming the ontological foundations of documentary cinema and everyday archiving practices. Against the background of accelerated digitalization of the media environment, the classical interpretation of the documentary fact as an indexical imprint of a real event becomes problematized and is being displaced by the model of a synthetic archive, in which testimony is constructed by computational procedures rather than only captured by the camera and preserved as an unalterable trace. Within the research optics, the central place is occupied by the transformation of the professional position of the director: the functional role of an immediate witness shifts toward the role of an interpreter of latent spaces, within whose bounds algorithms detect, reconfigure, and reconstruct visual-auditory evidence. In parallel, the parameters determining audience trust in materials created or restored through algorithmic generation are examined, including the conditions for legitimizing reconstructed testimony in the public sphere (World Economic Forum, 2023). The methodological framework of the work relies on a systemic review of specialized academic research, a comparative analysis of case studies (Another Body, Welcome to Chechnya), and the incorporation of neurobiological knowledge about memory consolidation into the theoretical apparatus of film studies. Such an approach makes it possible to connect aesthetic and ethical questions with cognitive mechanisms of the formation and retention of event-based experience, which is especially significant when discussing documentary practices grounded in reconstruction, masking, synthesis, and other forms of mediatization of the trace (Zacks et al., 2007). The results obtained show that, under an initially low level of trust in AI content (12%), generative models are capable of sustaining credibility on a different basis: through the reproduction of the emotional-semantic core of what has been lived through, which finds psychological support in the functioning of the brain’s cognitive systems, where memory consolidates not only the accuracy of details but also the generalized structure of meaningful experience. In conclusion, the position is substantiated that, under the conditions of an archive in reverse, the key guarantees of credibility become the ethical transparency of procedures and the curatorial agency of the director, who assumes responsibility for the interpretive frame, the boundaries of reconstruction, and the modes of presenting synthetically assembled testimony. The propositions presented are relevant to film theory, digital ethics, the professional environment of documentary practice, and research at the intersection of cognitive sciences and media communications.