Cannes and Oscars grapple with AI in film as industry debates creative control vs automation

Most mainstream films already use AI. The new Oscars rules won't stop that

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has adjusted the eligibility criteria for films vying for Oscars from 2027 onward. Films featuring actors generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are now ineligible, as are scripts that aren't demonstrably human-authored. Crucially, the rules do not ban AI - generative or otherwise - altogether. The Academy explicitly acknowledged the widespread adoption of generative AI, and has left it to voters to determine whether a film's creative direction is substantively driven by humans. Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor framed it simply: "humans have to be at the centre of the creative process". The rules were imposed following specific controversies: the 2025 awards season surfaced AI voice modification in The Brutalist, AI voice cloning in Emilia Pérez, and varying degrees of AI use in A Complete Unknown and Dune: Part Two. The resulting public debate has focused almost entirely on what audiences can see: generated faces, synthetic voices and digital resurrections. But this focus ignores the main areas of film production in which AI actually plays a key role. Cinema's automation history Automation tools have been embedded in cinema for longer than most people realise. When non-linear editing software Avid Media Composer launched in 1989, it replaced the physical cut-and-splice flatbed editing process that had defined post-production for decades. This all but eliminated traditional linear editing suites, and the skilled labour that went with them, within a few years. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) entered mainstream production with Tron (1982) and Jurassic Park (1993). And by the mid-2010s, deepfake and neural rendering technology (distinct from generative AI) made it possible to manipulate human likenesses directly - such as de-aging Jeff Bridges in the Tron sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010), and Michael Douglas and Kurt Russell in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Generative AI aids and improves these existing processes. Director Robert Zemeckis used AI company Metaphysic to de-age Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in real time, on camera while shooting Here (2024). And the forthcoming film As Deep as the Grave will feature an AI-generated likeness of Val Kilmer, who died in 2025. This is the most prominent case yet of AI being used to "generate" a performer who couldn't physically be present. These examples sit on an ethical spectrum, from de-aging a living actor to synthesising a performance based on a deceased star. The Academy's new rules attempt to draw a line somewhere on that spectrum. Where exactly that line should go is an ongoing question. Where AI is usually used in film The most pervasive uses of AI in contemporary mainstream productions are usually invisible to audiences. For most studio-produced feature films, AI-assisted platforms handle script breakdown in pre-production. They help with extracting production requirements based on the screenplay, scheduling shoots and modelling budgets. These tasks once took hours, or even days, to complete. On set, AI may be used to generate the background environments for virtual production stages. Originally used for TV shows such as The Mandalorian, these sets are increasingly used as a cost-effective option in studio productions. In post-production, AI tools handle first-pass editing, audio clean-up, VFX, and voice modification. For instance, Dune: Part Two (2024) used machine learning to achieve the blue-eye effect - a minor enhancement audiences don't immediately register. Arguably the most widespread (yet invisible) use of AI is for localisation, as streaming platforms pursue global audiences at scale. AI-assisted dubbing and subtitle generation are now standard processes. AI can also influence what films get made. Companies use algorithmic analysis to inform greenlight decisions, predict trailer performance, and optimise release windows. As Vue Cinemas CEO Tim Richards put it, "[AI] determines what we show at what cinema, on what screen and at what time". Automation and AI-driven processes have a long history in film. Yet it is only now, amidst the deluge of AI-generated content, that these modes of filmmaking have attracted the public's attention. Not a new problem, but a newly visible one The Academy's changes do not reflect a resistance to innovation - but a centring of human authorship. The most publicly legible creative contributions to a film should remain demonstrably human in origin. That's a reasonable position, with broad support across audiences and industry professionals alike. But it sits alongside the harder question of consent: not just whether AI was used, but whether the people whose likenesses, voices, and labour are implicated actually agreed to it. The Oscars' rules are about disclosure as much as eligibility - and they aren't alone. Many publishers and creative bodies are now formulating AI principles that emphasise the need for transparency. The question isn't whether AI is being used in film and TV production; it is. The question is whether audiences have the right to know -- and whether public discourse has caught up enough to know what it's even asking about. Generative AI is the latest inflection in a long history of automation -- more powerful and fast-moving than its predecessors, but no different in the questions it raises. The pressing task now is making sure the frameworks for consent, disclosure and creative attribution keep pace with AI technology.

A filmmaking tool or an existential threat: Cannes Film Festival weighs the rise of AI

CANNES, France (AP) -- The Cannes Film Festival can function like a global water cooler for movies, with prevailing issues and anxieties tending to come to the surface at the event. This year, the topic du jour is artificial intelligence. The 79th Cannes may go down as the time the world's grandest film festival for the first time wrestled with the onset of AI -- its arrival has been felt like a tsunami on the French Riviera. Its potential to remake the movie industry, for good or bad, has been an ongoing debate since the festival opened. And in many quarters, the tone is softening. "The buzz in Cannes and the buzz in the industry, it does feel like it's definitely a turning point," said Scott Mann, co-chief executive of Flawless, a company that specializes in assistive AI programs for post-production. On screen and off, AI is much more present. For the first time, Cannes has partnered with Meta in a new multiyear deal. The company has set up camp at the Majestic Hotel. And its AI tools were used to help produce a festival entry: Steven Soderbergh's "John Lennon: The Last Interview." The documentary is about a lengthy and insightful interview Lennon and Yoko Ono gave on the day Lennon was shot and killed in 1980. To add imagery to match Lennon's conversation, Soderbergh used Meta's AI programs to create surreal graphics. The choice brought scorn from most critics in Cannes, but Soderbergh, a highly skilled innovator who has shot movies on iPhones, believes its time for such experimentation. "We haven't seen yet someone with a certain amount of creative credibility go full-metal AI on something, and see how people react. I think it's necessary," Soderbergh said in an interview. "How do you know where the line is until somebody crosses it? I don't think what I'm doing crosses it. Some people may disagree. I don't know where my line is yet. I'm waiting to see." Filmmakers, actors and others at Cannes have been drawing their own lines, or at least making pronouncements about AI. On opening day, Demi Moore, a juror, said fighting AI "is a battle we will lose." The next day, honorary Palme d'Or recipient Peter Jackson, said: "I don't dislike it at all. To me, it's just a special effect. It's no different from other special effects." Filmmaker James Gray, whose starry family drama "Paper Tiger" was one of the standouts over the weekend, said he's not worried. "In some cases, it can be a very helpful tool," said Gray in an interview. "I don't think in our lifetime, or even our children's lifetimes, it will come close to mirroring the only true infinite we know, which is the soul." "The answer I think is that most young people should be studying the humanities," added Gray. "People should be reading Tolstoy in their spare time to understand the human soul." Cannes is unfolding in the wake of some significant new developments for AI in Hollywood. Earlier this month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science announced new guidelines, ruling that only performances "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" will be considered for acting nominations. At the same time, the Oscar group also said AI tools "neither help nor harm the chance of a nomination." The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists recently reached a tentative agreement with studios detailing and clarifying AI guardrails for things like the use of digital replicas and synthetic performers. Some advancements have sent shudders through Hollywood. The unveiling of Tilly Norwood, an entirely AI-created so-called "actress," sparked outrage through the industry. Earlier this year, the first look at a posthumous AI resurrection of Val Kilmer, for a film made with his family's consent, spawned another round of debate. But while more extreme uses of generative AI continue to prompt worry, other iterations continue to make inroads. "It is going to be a part of our business," Kent Sanderson, Bleecker Street chief executive, said in a panel discussion. "It is going to lower production costs, and yes, you probably will be able to make something that looks like a Marvel movie in your basement in a couple of years." While Cannes has stringent rules for what can and can't be worn on its red carpet, it's issuing no decrees banning AI from film selections -- for now. The day before the festival began, Cannes' artistic director Thierry Frémaux wryly responded to a question about AI, noting that he had also heard James Cameron had used special effects for "Avatar." "What I can say with certainty in relation to artificial intelligence is that we are on the side of the artists, the screenwriters, actors and voice actors," said Frémaux. "We stand with everyone whose job could be negatively impacted by artificial intelligence. It requires legislation. We need to control this." Mann, the Flawless executive, was sitting on the Cannes beach outside a party his company was throwing in one of the seaside clubs that regularly host movie after-parties. Since 2019, Flawless has set out to demonstrate that AI can be used thoughtfully. Unlicensed generative AI is bad, he states unequivocally. "But what we've found is that the way people don't understand is part of the problem. AI as a term is seen as a catchall, but it's not that simple," says Scott. "The truth is, our industry needs saving. It needs a technological evolution, and this is offering it."

The Filmmakers at Cannes Who Are Learning to Love AI

Jafar Panahi to Again Face Trial in Iran on "Propaganda" Charges Nikola Todorovic has heard all the panic. He's scrolled through the Instagram reels of AI-generated shots, read the think pieces predicting cinema's imminent extinction, and sat through more than a few conference panels at the Cannes Film Market where the word "disruption" was wielded like a cudgel. He gets it. He also thinks most of the conversation is completely missing the point. The Bosnia-born co-founder, of Wonder Dynamics, now an Autodesk company, has spent a decade trying to build something more precise than the blunt instrument the industry argues about: AI tools designed to reduce the technical drudgery of visual effects production without pulling the human artist out of the equation. His pitch at Cannes this week is the same one he's been making since 2016. "We were really focused on how do we make AI that coexist with the existing pipeline," he says. It is, in its way, the defining argument of the 79th Cannes Film Festival -- one that has run as a persistent undercurrent beneath the red-carpet premieres and the Palme d'Or competition. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape the film industry. That debate, to many here, already feels settled. The more urgent and thornier question is which version of AI Hollywood is actually talking about -- and whether the industry has the sophistication, or the will, to tell the difference. At the opening jury press conference, The Substance star Demi Moore, serving this year on the nine-member feature film jury led by Park Chan-wook, offered her own pragmatic read on the moment. "I think the reality is that to resist -- I always feel that against-ness breeds against-ness," she told reporters. "AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it I think is a more valuable path to take." She acknowledged that the industry was "probably not" doing enough to protect itself, but added that whatever ground AI might gain, "what it can never replace is what true art comes from, which is not the physical. It comes from the soul. It comes from the spirit of each and every one of us sitting here." Moore's nuance was appreciated by at least one camp on the Croisette -- the faction of filmmakers and technologists who have spent years trying to carve out a middle ground between wholesale resistance and uncritical embrace. Todorovic knows that ground intimately. In 2016, he and actor Tye Sheridan -- fresh off the set of Steven Spielberg's motion-capture-heavy Ready Player One -- founded Wonder Dynamics to automate the most technically and economically burdensome parts of visual effects production without removing the filmmaker from the creative act. Motion capture without a suit. Lighting and compositing driven by machine learning. The company attracted seed funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, board members including Joe Russo and early involvement from Spielberg himself. The Russo brothers used the technology on The Electric State, their Netflix production starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. In 2024, Autodesk acquired the company. The practical results, Todorovic says, have been considerable. "We've had animation studios tell us they basically increased their productivity from doing 30 seconds a day of animation to three and a half minutes a day," he says. "And we've had production companies of five to seven people that said they could now do things they could never do before." But what Wonder Dynamics is emphatically not building, Todorovic insists, is a replacement for the filmmaking act itself. "We're not in the business of 'let's prompt a movie,'" he says. "I'm not a believer that you can prompt a movie, prompt a performance, prompt a camera move. Tye is an actor, and I think the beauty of filmmaking is having an actor give a performance, having a cinematographer set up the frame, having a director direct." The economic logic for AI-assisted production is hard to argue with. One French director, Xavier Gens, told Reuters here that AI tools could have cut the visual effects budget of his Netflix hit Under Paris in half and shaved eight months off the schedule. Morgan Stanley analysts have estimated generative AI could reduce film and TV production costs by as much as 30 percent. The broader absurdity of current industry economics drives Todorovic. "We think it's normal that a film should cost $90 million, $100 million, $200 million -- which to me is absolutely absurd," he says. "A hospital will cost you $20 million to build, and it's there for two hundred years. And one movie, maybe based on a terrible idea, can cost $200 million plus marketing. And it could flop." But Todorovic is equally clear-eyed about the disruption that is coming regardless of how the debate is framed. "I think a lot of you'll hear people saying, 'Oh, we're accelerating, we're not replacing' -- I think there's just being politically correct. There's a shift, 100 percent, and I think visual effects get hit first, because it's very tech dependent." The jobs that were created because CGI was slow and difficult -- character creation artists, rigging artists, texture artists -- face real risk. "Those are the jobs that are in danger," he says. "It would be a lie to say otherwise." And yet he remains, by his own account, optimistic about the longer arc. His vision is less about Hollywood's incumbents and more about the filmmaker who currently has no path into the industry. "Me coming from a small country, it took me a long time to break in," he says. "I'm very optimistic long term, and it is going to open up for more people to tell stories, more voices to be discovered." There is, however, a precondition. "I think we need to step in and build AI how we want it to be used," Todorovic says, "otherwise we're going to have the tech industry leading it for the wrong reasons -- to create videos for TikTok in a day versus creating an actual film." That friction -- between Silicon Valley's incentives and cinema's -- was visible throughout the Marché du Film this week, where startups pitched everything from automated VFX pipelines to AI-generated simulated focus groups. Representatives from Alphabet, Disney Accelerator, NVIDIA, and OpenAI all made appearances in the market's new Innovation Village, overlooking the yacht-filled harbor. But for every figure willing to embrace AI as a production tool, others on the Croisette were drawing harder lines. Seth Rogen, here to present Tangles -- the hand-drawn animated film he co-produced with his wife Lauren Miller Rogen about a family navigating Alzheimer's disease -- was direct when asked about AI in filmmaking. "Every time I see a video on Instagram that's like, 'Hollywood is cooked,' what follows is the most stupid dog s -- I've ever seen in my life," he told Brut. "And if your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process, you shouldn't be a writer. Because you're not writing. Go do something else." On Tangles specifically, Rogen was unequivocal: "Not at all. It's hand-drawn animation. Every frame has a human touch to it." The film received a seven-minute ovation at its Cannes premiere. It is, in its own way, the same argument Guillermo del Toro has been making for years -- and never more pointedly than this week. Del Toro returned to Cannes to present a 4K restoration of Pan's Labyrinth, marking the 20th anniversary of its world premiere and the still-unbroken record of a 23-minute standing ovation, having personally supervised every stage of the restoration from the original 35mm negative. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, del Toro offered what may be the most precise diagnosis of the festival's central argument. "The thing is, to have the discussion, we have to start defining AI, because they're trying to pass five types of things under one single name," he said. "So what are you talking about? Are you talking about a tracking program? Are you talking about rotoscope? Or are you talking about generative AI, where you remove the artist from the equation? The nomenclature has to change before we can have a real discussion. Otherwise it's just a headline." Taking the stage before the restoration screening, del Toro took a more impassioned tone. "We are, unfortunately, in times that make this movie more pertinent than ever," he said, "because they tell us everything is useless to resist, that art can be done with a f -- ing app." Todorovic, for his part, would not disagree with the sentiment, even if his instrument is different. "We like art because it's difficult," he says. "We like film because it's difficult. We admire work where only that one person can do this, because that's their voice, and it's so hard to do that. We're not going to go pay to watch something someone spent a few days prompting." What he is betting on -- and what Wonder Dynamics was built around -- is a version of cinema's future that looks less like a prompt box and more like a wider door. "Technology has always driven the film industry," he says, "and there's always been resistance, but we've always depended on each other." The first Hollywood studios, he notes, were founded by producers fleeing Thomas Edison's technology monopoly on the motion picture camera. "The first studio was created by producers who were saying storytelling should be for everyone, and there shouldn't be one company that holds the technology and holds us hostage." In the Innovation Village, on the Croisette, and in the Debussy Theatre where a Cannes audience gave Pan's Labyrinth a hero's welcome all over again, the argument at this festival is clarifying. The question isn't really about AI. It's about what makes a film worth making in the first place -- and whether the tools Hollywood reaches for help answer that question, or quietly make it disappear.