{"id":699312,"date":"2026-05-28T12:23:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T12:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/699312\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T12:23:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T12:23:08","slug":"at-cannes-hollywoods-war-against-ai-is-over-and-the-robots-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/699312\/","title":{"rendered":"At Cannes, Hollywood\u2019s war against AI is over \u2013 and the robots won"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year at the Cannes Film Festival<\/a>, any mention of \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d was made with a kind of hushed, almost guilty sense of secrecy \u2013 these were taboo conversations to be conducted as far away from the red carpets and press-junket suites as possible. At this year\u2019s edition, though, AI enjoyed its unofficial coming out party, with the technology \u2013 and its supposed potential to completely upend the film industry for the better \u2013 impossible to avoid, no matter how AI-skeptical your sentiments. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Illustration by Lorenzo Sainati<\/p>\n

At the March\u00e9 du Film<\/a>, a week-long gauntlet of meetings and industry panels that runs parallel to the official festival, the convention space inside the basement of the Grand Palais hub was so jammed with buyers and sellers touting their various AI-assisted projects that you\u2019d be forgiven for thinking that traditional filmmaking, such as it is, was simply no longer in fashion. <\/p>\n

On the market floor, trade magazines including Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were littered with ads for such companies as InevitAble, the \u201chuman-first AI cinema studio,\u201d which promises to make your next blockbuster for just $300,000. Meanwhile, the L.A.-based sales and financing giant AGC Studios was shopping the AI-produced animated film Critterz, a \u201chuman-led but AI-assisted\u201d family flick that boasted ties to industry giant OpenAI. And such well-known filmmakers as Roger Avary (who co-wrote Pulp Fiction and directed The Rules of Attraction), Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City), and Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, The Whale) were busy prowling the French Riviera, hyping up their new AI-assisted genre projects. <\/p>\n

Q&A: What the Cannes Film Festival says about the future of film, according to our film editor<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cQuite rightly there\u2019s a huge amount of both curiosity but also caution around AI, and we believe that Critterz is going about the process in the right way, because it is very much human-led, creatively,\u201d Stuart Ford, chief executive of AGC, said in an interview with The Globe. \u201cIt was imagined by humans, it was written by humans, the characters were designed by humans, it will be scored by a human, it will be edited by a human. The use of AI is just to do the heavy lifting of the animation. We hope that distributors will really rally behind this, because our sense is that this is a film going down the correct path for AI and cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

That path was the focus of the March\u00e9\u2019s own two-day AI for Talent Summit, which expanded on last year\u2019s inaugural single-day edition to bring together leading figures from the entertainment and tech sectors to discuss practical applications of AI in filmmaking. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The March\u00e9 du Film runs parallel to the film festival at Cannes and, this year, featured vendors touting various AI-assisted projects.SAMEER AL-DOUMY\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cIndustry professionals can have very different opinions on AI, and our responsibility is to provide a platform where these debates can take place openly and constructively,\u201d said Guillaume Esmiol, executive director of the March\u00e9 du Film. \u201cAI generates both excitement and concerns within the film industry. Our mission is to help professionals better understand how these technologies work, to showcase concrete filmmaking use cases, and to address the major questions they raise, especially around intellectual property rights and authors\u2019 remuneration.\u201d<\/p>\n

As to whether there were more AI-assisted projects being shopped on the Cannes market this year than ever before, Esmiol cautioned that the notion of \u201cAI cinema\u201d itself needs to be more clearly defined \u2013 which is partially what the March\u00e9\u2019s summit was designed to achieve. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat exactly qualifies as an \u2018AI-assisted\u2019 film? Does it refer only to production and postproduction tools? Does it include scriptwriting support? And to what extent?\u201d Esmiol said. \u201cUsing AI to check the wording of a sentence is very different from having large portions of a screenplay generated by AI. \u2026 The conversation is therefore becoming less about whether AI is used or not, and more about how it is used, with what intention, and under what creative and ethical framework.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘The Substance’ star Demi Moore, ‘Hamnet’ director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao and ‘Sentimental Value’ actor Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd describe their reaction to being invited onto the Cannes Film Festival jury, led by South Korean director Park Chan-wook.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press<\/p>\n

The AI enthusiasm spread beyond the March\u00e9, though. The tech behemoth Meta, which has gone all-in on AI, was an official sponsor of the festival itself, hosting an invite-only pop-up at the ritzy Majestic Hotel to showcase its new Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. The company also partnered with acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh for his new documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview, which uses AI to produce what the director calls \u201cthematic surrealism,\u201d and which played in the festival\u2019s \u201cspecial screenings\u201d program. <\/p>\n

Cannes jury member Demi Moore, meanwhile, kicked off the festival with a stir when she declared during the opening press conference that any industry fight against AI was, essentially, over before it really began. <\/p>\n

\u201cI always feel that against-ness breeds against-ness,\u201d the actress said. \u201cAI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI was also being employed in at least one of the festival\u2019s official competition films, albeit in a nearly imperceptible way. <\/p>\n

For the James Gray crime thriller Paper Tiger<\/a>, the L.A.-based Zoic Studios worked on a sequence, using proprietary AI technology built inside an established visual-effects pipeline. The goal: to modify the wardrobe of actor Miles Teller to ensure continuity after it was decided during editing that two separately shot scenes needed to be stitched together. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a visual effects artist\u2019s tool. We don\u2019t look at it in the sense that it\u2019s going to replace artists, or change how we do things \u2013 it\u2019s going to enhance how we do things,\u201d said Zoic co-founder Chris Jones, who noted that the task would have taken one to two weeks\u2019 worth of manual labour, but was completed in only a few days with AI. \u201cIn cases like this, there are substantial savings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Analysis: In Cannes, a new cultural world order emerges<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, in terms of key words, the conversation around AI at Cannes seemed to revolve around just one: money. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest shift has been how AI is helping facilitate and create better production plans, ultimately reducing costs by as much as half,\u201d said Roeg Sutherland, co-head of media finance at the Hollywood agency giant CAA. \u201cYou can\u2019t ignore AI, because it\u2019s becoming part of our daily life. If we can make five movies instead of one, then that is better for the business overall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Actor Cate Blanchett unveiled at Cannes her AI-skeptical non-profit RSL Media initiative.Andreas Rentz\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Not every filmmaker at Cannes, though, agreed with the predominantly pro-AI sentiment. <\/p>\n

\u201cWith this film, I got ChatGPT to have a read of my screenplay to give some feedback just as an experiment,\u201d said director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose new movie Sheep in the Box, following a grieving couple who replace their deceased son with an AI-developed robot, premiered in the festival\u2019s official competition. \u201cAnd I prefer the feedback that comes from seeing the actors on set and doing the editing myself and seeing how things can work better, that kind of organic process. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s room for AI in that process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, as much as splashy AI-forward events dominated the festival \u2013 from the insiders-only party hosted by AI giant Anthropic alongside former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to the yacht soirees in which producers sold visions of an AI-inevitable future \u2013 there were also moments of passionate dissent. <\/p>\n

Soderbergh\u2019s Lennon doc, which the director defended by saying that AI was employed \u201cessentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology,\u201d received some of the very worst reviews of the filmmaker\u2019s storied career. (\u201cThe appallingly ugly AI-generated imagery only highlights the project\u2019s flimsy reason to exist,\u201d declared IndieWire.) <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Cate Blanchett unveiled her decidedly AI-skeptical non-profit RSL Media initiative, built around the concept of human consent when it comes to performers and any AI usage. And such leading industry figures as Tilda Swinton planted their own anti-slop flags in the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as what we\u2019re not producing is formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn\u2019t have a chance,\u201d Swinton said during an onstage discussion. \u201cWhat we need to do is what only humans can do: Make messy, adventurous experiences so that an audience does not know what\u2019s coming next.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, any mention of \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d was made with a kind of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-699312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}