Before AI can generate professional videos, it needs to see like a professional. We spent a year with 100+ content creators teaching AI to describe video like a filmmaker would. Introducing CHAI: Critique-based Human-AI Oversight for Building a Precise Video Language [CVPR'26 Highlight, Top 3%]. Try prompting a video generator for a dolly zoom, dutch angle, point of view, or camera roll. Most fall back to the same bland defaults: a push-in, a level shot, a third-person view. Why? These techniques require a language of cinema that current models rarely speak. We built that language: 1️⃣ Precise specification: 5-aspect structured captions co-designed with professional cinematographers covering subject, scene, motion, spatial, and camera dynamics 2️⃣ Scalable oversight: LLMs draft captions, humans critique what's wrong and how to fix it 3️⃣ Post-training recipes: Qwen3-VL-8B surpasses Gemini-3.1 and GPT-5 4️⃣ Video generation: fine-tuned Wan follows 400-word cinematic prompts with precise control Here's how each works 🧵 Work led by CMU and Harvard with @chancharikm, @du_yilun, and @RamananDeva. 📄 Paper: huggingface.co/papers/2604.2… 🌐 Site: linzhiqiu.github.io/papers/c…