AI 'Crashes the Party' at This Year's Cannes Film Festival - Including Multi-Year Meta Partnership

AI "crashed the party" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, writes The Hollywood Reporter. The festival exposed "the fault lines reshaping cinema," their article argues, including how "AI is here — and the industry has stopped pretending otherwise." A humanoid robot spotted marching up and down the Croisette seemed to sum up the worst AI fears of the film industry — the machines have arrived and they are taking your place. But inside the Palais and the market tents, the conversation over artificial intelligence had moved beyond fear into something more like uneasy acceptance. Fighting AI "is a battle we will lose," said Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this year, at the festival's opening press conference, suggesting the film industry needs to "find ways in which we can work with it."

That's not the official Cannes line. The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup. But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted. AI-friendly tech giant Meta signed on as an official partner to the festival in a multiyear deal. Its AI tools were used to help produce an [out of competition] festival entry: Steven Soderbergh's documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. [Meta's press release announcing the partnership touts "our creator partnerships," their Meta AI assistant, and "our latest AI and wearable technologies" including Ray-Ban Meta AI features for smartglasses like "AI-powered translations that break down language barriers in real-time".] At the Marché du Film [film market], there was an "AI for Talent Summit" that took the AI revolution as given, focusing instead on ethical AI use, data sovereignty and on the ways the technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity.

For the indie film industry, it felt like a turning point.

AI films are just animated films

[drnb]

AI films are just animated films. We moved away from hand drawn and painted a long time ago. CGI in animated is the norm. It seems to me we are moving away from human 3D modeling and animation to AI driven 3D modeling an animation. That's it. The rendering is already CGI.

Just classify AI as animated film. That's what it really is. Live action remains something different. Live theatre remains something different.

Re:

[Presence Eternal]

It may eventually occur to people that art which no one ever cared about is as valuable as a random screenshot of World of Warcraft.

Re:

[drnb]

It may also occur to people that low quality mass produced art sold to the masses is nothing new.

Re:

[sound+vision]

You should give more credit to how far these guys have advanced the state of the art. The quality today, with these tools, is lower than they've ever been able to make it.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

you clearly haven't seen the video AI can already do.

Re:

[drnb]

you clearly haven't seen the video AI can already do.

If you are referring to photorealism that changes nothing. The film remains animated.

If you are referring to the uncanny valley, that will be a matter of experience with the new tools, better algorithms, greater processing power, etc.

The Oscar for Least Extra Fingers goes to...

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Demi Moore came out as an AI booster? Has anybody asked the Double-Dose-of-the-Substance Monster what she thinks? I honestly think she's more qualified to opine on people throwing away the old ways and unthinkingly embracing ugly new fads.

Re:

[drnb]

Demi Moore came out as an AI booster? Has anybody asked the Double-Dose-of-the-Substance Monster what she thinks? I honestly think she's more qualified to opine on people throwing away the old ways and unthinkingly embracing ugly new fads.

What old ways are being thrown away? AI film is just animated film with AI generated modeling and animation. Photorealism does not change this. Live action films will continue. Just as live theatre continues. Live action may just become less common. The barrier to entry to film making lowered. AI will revolutionize film making, but someone will still make a piece of art with human actors just as someone still chips away at a chunk of marble rather than using robotic carvers.

You joke but that can become an unconscious thing.

[Fly Swatter]

If you play around enough in stable diffusion or any AI image generation framework, at least I find myself now making sure hands and feet are in order for every photo I look at. It becomes an unconscious thing just like ignoring advertisements embedded all over a web page.

AI shoehorn

[jhoegl]

Everything must be AI, shows how desperate they want to make AI a thing.

its not... and its sad to see. Its like watching someone who likes you force themselves into your life. They dont allow for capitalism to naturally gain momentum, they force it on people to try and give something to investors.
Sad.

Re:

[drnb]

Momentum was manipulated by advertising in ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Babylon, ... :-)

Awards for AI slop

[sinkskinkshrieks]

Barring significant artistic input, they risk rewarding shitposts over organic content. Maybe there's too many sanctioned Russian oligarchs who aren't supposed to be there in France pushing crap and hobnobbing with criminals like they do in Italy.

Re:

[Rei]

AI video technology is still nowhere even remotely near just "click a button and take what it spits out". I don't know how to break this to anyone here, but you're not just going to go to some video generation site and turn out Woodnuts [youtube.com] without extensive skill about AI video tools themselves and a wide range of traditional video production tools, and without spending weeks to months and significant financial expense on the project.

Even if / when this changes, video production is still always going to be li

AI is a tool, not a medium

[allo]

Talking about AI movies is like talking about blender movies. Yeah, there are movies that are advertised BECAUSE they are produced with blender, but most movies are advertised as being 3D movies and not as being blender movies. The medium is digital art, AI is the tool to create it.

META and the classic institutional two-step

[Mirnotoriety]

This is the classic institutional two-step. They're hedging their bets: wanting the cultural capital of being seen as guardians of "real cinema" while actively courting sponsorship money, innovation buzz, and younger creators who are already using the tools. This is exactly the uneasy acceptance phase. Some guests are pretending to ignore the new arrivals, while others are already networking with them in the VIP tent.

Lonely Future

[TwistedGreen]

I, for one, can't wait to be able to lie back and have a movie generated for me on demand. I don't think I'd even need to give a very specific prompt: they should have enough tracking data about me to know what I like. Maybe they can even insert uncannily specific product placements for me to enjoy, so as not to break immersion. Afterwards, I can discuss the movie with my AI chatbots and fulfill my socialization needs.

What a lonely future we have planned.

Re:

[sound+vision]

The fear is that you might start talking to your neighbor about dangerous things like "How come everything sucks now?"