Jeroen Hallaert

Jeroen Hallaert's core position, repeated across his appearance on Virtual, is a deliberately measured one on artificial intelligence: it is powerful but immature, and its future usefulness depends on how carefully the industry handles it now. His central metaphor captures this: "Ai is momenteel een stevige kleuter die nog altijd gezonde voeding moet hebben, nog altijd zijn pamper moet ververst hebben... hoe beter dat we AI opvoeden, hoe beter dat we er in de toekomst van kunnen gebruik maken" ¹². The framing of AI as a toddler that needs proper upbringing rather than a finished tool runs through everything else he says, positioning him neither as an AI skeptic nor an evangelist but as someone arguing for patient, responsible development.

On the question of whether AI threatens creative work in entertainment, Hallaert is unambiguous: it does not, at least not in the sense of replacing storytelling. "Ai is nog altijd iets generatief, dat is niet creatief. Er zit nog een human aspect aan verbonden," he says ², drawing a firm line between generative output and genuine creative authorship. He grounds this in a concrete industry example rather than abstraction: generative AI can already produce a full storyboard for a TV show pitch, which speeds up development, but the technology "gewoon een andere tool in de toolbag" ¹. His takeaway is practical rather than defensive, that the time saved by AI on production tasks should be reinvested into creative work itself, "als we kunnen meer tijd stoppen in creativiteit, gaat ook de kwaliteit van de producties naar boven" ¹. This is a recurring pattern in his thinking, treating efficiency gains from technology as a means to elevate craft rather than a threat to jobs or artistry.

Hallaert extends this same logic to hardware and the viewing experience, specifically pushback against the idea that VR and AR headsets represent the future of entertainment displays. His reasoning is sociological rather than technical: entertainment is fundamentally a shared, group experience, and individual headsets cut against that grain ¹². Rather than physical screens disappearing, he sees the trajectory moving toward screens becoming transparent and eventually invisible or holographic, technology that recedes rather than technology that isolates ¹². This is a notably grounded take amid AI and immersive-tech hype, prioritizing the social function of entertainment over pure technical novelty.

On the industrial and geographic side, Hallaert speaks from inside the Los Angeles entertainment ecosystem and is emphatic about its continued dominance, stating plainly that "La is nog steeds Entertainment Capital City Of The World, waar de meeste zo niet alle belangrijke beslissingen nog altijd genomen worden" ². Yet he simultaneously makes the case for Belgian talent and companies, describing how large-scale events like the LA 2028 Olympics generate long-term industrial momentum, and how after the LA fires the city has begun discussing using entertainment industry companies for the rebuild, since these firms excel at logistics and rapid construction once traditional construction firms reach capacity ¹². He notes Belgian companies are already part of that effort, a detail he offers as evidence that Flemish entertainment-tech expertise can compete on a global stage even while its center of gravity remains in LA.

Taken together, his appearance reads as an argument for measured optimism paired with local ambition. He does not dismiss AI's disruptive potential, but he insists the disruption is about workflow and speed rather than the erosion of human creativity, and he consistently returns to the idea that new tools are only as good as the care put into developing them. His comments on the LA rebuild and the Olympics reveal a belief that entertainment-industry skills, logistics, construction, and large-scale live production, have value well beyond content creation itself, positioning the sector as adjacent to civic infrastructure work rather than separate from it. The consistent thread from AI to VR to industrial rebuilding is a preference for practical, tool-based framing over speculative hype, judging every technology by whether it serves shared human experience and creative output rather than replacing them.