Under a white marquee on Cannes\u2019 Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across the horizon, the director Darren Aronofsky addressed an audience of executives and tech evangelists gathered for an \u201cAI for Talent\u201d summit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much pushback against AI,\u201d said Aronofsky, who has faced criticism over his embrace of generative AI projects though his new studio, Primordial Soup, at a time when artificial intelligence has become one of the film industry\u2019s most divisive fault lines.<\/p>\n
Darren Aronofsky: \u2018AI is not impersonating a person, it\u2019s actually a tool.\u2019 Photograph: Teresa Su\u00e1rez\/EPA<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is a terrible word, because it\u2019s a catchphrase for so many different things,\u201d continued the director of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan. \u201cThe thing we deal with when we\u2019re talking to Chat GPT about the weather, or how to spend three days in Cannes, is very different to the AI we\u2019re using to generate images. It\u2019s not impersonating a person, it\u2019s actually a tool.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Cannes is a barometer for the film industry\u2019s anxieties and obsessions, this year the subject of AI dominated more than any other. From beachside summits and yacht parties to press conferences, leading figures debated whether AI was cinema\u2019s next creative revolution or an existential threat to film-makers.<\/p>\n
Aronofsky\u2019s Primordial Soup has partnered with Google DeepMind on projects including Dustin Yellin\u2019s short Goodnight Lamby, which premiered in Cannes.<\/p>\n
He argued that the technology could solve practical and ethical production problems, citing one project in which AI tools allowed film-makers to avoid using a real newborn baby on set by digitally transforming what an actor was holding into \u201ca live baby\u201d. \u201cNone of these movies would exist without this technology,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re not replacing anything, they\u2019re purely additive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in Cannes, AI startups and studios competed to position themselves at the forefront of Hollywood\u2019s next transformation. During an event hosted on a yacht by the generative video platform Higgsfield, the film-maker Chuck Russell unveiled two AI-driven sci-fi features by his company Neumorphic AI. \u201cAI technologies are expanding the cinematic toolbox to a scale we\u2019ve never had before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
AI also became a talking point because of Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh\u2019s new documentary, John Lennon: The Last Interview. Created in partnership with Meta, the film reconstructs Lennon and Yoko Ono\u2019s final radio conversation on 8 December 1980, using AI for about 10% of its imagery.<\/p>\n
Steven Soderbergh whose new film John Lennon: The Last Interview uses AI for about 10% of its imagery. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes\/Reuters<\/p>\n
Soderbergh described the stylised sequences \u2013 including crying infants in 1960s clothing and cavemen acting out Lennon\u2019s reflections on masculinity \u2013 as \u201cthematic surrealism\u201d, insisting they were intended as metaphor rather than deception.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology,\u201d he said recently. \u201cMy moral obligation is honesty in how we achieved certain things.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the divisions over AI now run across the industry. Guillermo del Toro recently said he would \u201crather die\u201d than use AI in his films, while others such as Reese Witherspoon have invested heavily in AI storytelling tools. The late Val Kilmer recently appeared posthumously in a trailer using an AI-generated recreation of his performance.<\/p>\n
Studio executives have said hybrid AI productions could allow several mid-budget films to be made for the price of a single blockbuster. Last year, the unveiling of Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated \u201cactress\u201d marketed as a potential Hollywood star, prompted backlash from actors and unions.<\/p>\n
While films primarily generated by AI have been banned from Cannes\u2019 main competition, leading figures urged the industry to adapt.<\/p>\n
Aronofsky described fears that computers would soon replace human storytellers as \u201cscience fiction\u201d, and framed the technology as part of cinema\u2019s long technological evolution, comparing it to the arrival of sound, portable cameras and visual effects, and said it could create countless jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Guillermo del Toro, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie at Imax will always exist, and I will continue to make movies like that,\u201d he said. \u201cStorytelling is not going away. These tools are hopefully going to make it easier for many new storytellers to tell stories and connect.\u201d<\/p>\n
Serving on this year\u2019s competition jury, Demi Moore said: \u201cAI is here, to fight it is a battle that we will lose.\u201d Moore acknowledged concerns about protecting artists, but insisted technology could never replace the \u201chuman soul and spirit\u201d at the centre of film-making.<\/p>\n
Jury member Demi Moore said: \u2018AI is here, to fight it is a battle that we will lose.\u2019 Photograph: Andreea Alexandru\/AP<\/p>\n
Peter Jackson, who received an honorary Palme d\u2019Or, defended more limited uses of AI, comparing it to the stop-motion techniques pioneered in early cinema. \u201cAI used in the right way, it\u2019s just a tool like any other tool,\u201d he said. \u201cBut like anything, it\u2019s going to come down to the imagination and originality of the person feeding the instructions into the AI program. Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative?\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Seth Rogen dismissed the idea of AI-assisted screenwriting while promoting his animated film Tangles. \u201cIf your instinct is to use AI, you shouldn\u2019t be a writer,\u201d he said, mocking the flood of AI-generated clips online as \u201cthe most stupid dog shit I\u2019ve ever seen in my life\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dominic Lees, leader of the Synthetic Media Research Network, said Cannes had \u201cembraced\u201d the AI controversy for several years. In 2024, the competition film Emilia P\u00e9rez used AI voice modification technology to extend the vocal range of Karla Sof\u00eda Gasc\u00f3n.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is trying to steady the boat after major rows over the use of AI to improve Adrien Brody\u2019s Hungarian accent in The Brutalist, but it is making a mess of it,\u201d Lees added.<\/p>\n
\u201cNew rules say that acting must be \u2018demonstrably performed by humans\u2019 \u2013 but no one knows if the tweaking of Brody\u2019s accent would have lost him the Oscar that he won for the film.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Under a white marquee on Cannes\u2019 Croisette beach, with the Mediterranean glistening behind him and superyachts drifting across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-691043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}