The Current Debate | AI and Cinema, or: What Is a Film?

Дата публикации: 26-06-2026 08:00:00

The Current Debate connects the dots around a topic of the critical conversation.Dreams of Violets (Ash Koosha, 2026).On June 10, Dreams of Violets (2026) made history. An entirely AI-generated, 75-minute docudrama about Iran’s civilian resistance, it premiered at the 25th Tribeca Festival, the first full-length feature created by artificial intelligence to be accepted at a major film festival. Produced by studio Fountain 0 for less than $2,000 and made in three months, it centers on five strangers who meet in a dead-end Tehran alley while running from the revolutionary guards sent to kill them, a chance encounter witnessed by a boy living with cerebral palsy in a nearby flat. Dreams of Violets required a host of different AI softwares—“Kling AI for video generation, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, Google’s Gemini and Nanobanana for research and imagery, and Fountain 0’s own technology for blocking and frame accuracy,” Corbin Bolies reports at Variety—and the human operating those from his London home, Iranian-British Ash Koosha, said in a statement that the film originated from the real-world protests that swept across Iran in January this year, which claimed the lives of over 7,000 civilians and led to the incarceration of more than 50,000 others, per Iranian Human Rights News Agency HRANA. “It was not a technological exercise,” the director stated, but rather “a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross.”I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions. I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film. My answer is that the alternative — silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome — is worse. The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.Koosha’s concerns for the film’s “difficult” ethical questions didn’t do much to dispel the controversy around its inclusion at the festival, nor did Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal’s clumsy attempt to defend the choice. “If somebody wrote a song about it, you wouldn’t say anything, if somebody wrote a poem about it, you wouldn’t say anything, if somebody wanted to dance about it, you wouldn’t say anything,” she told Variety’s Anna Tingley. “Is it perfect? No. But it’s something that should be seen right now at this time.” Rosenthal’s comments are misguided at best. The contentious point here isn’t that someone made a film about the tragedy, but if someone actually did—in other words, whether making a movie, especially one about the kind of atrocities Koosha wants to document, should require more than inputting orders into a software and letting that conjure those horrors on our behalf. Speaking with Cath Clarke at The Guardian, Koosha admitted that he struggled to find festivals willing to screen his feature debut. But if the festival world still purports to treat the new tech like kryptonite, alternative showcases have begun to mushroom. The World AI Film Festival—an itinerant event that “envisions a new era of cinema where artificial intelligence becomes a creative partner, not a shortcut,” and where “influencers become filmmakers […] not to produce disposable content, but to create cinematic works that matter”—wrapped its 2026 global tour at Cannes’s Palais des Festivals just three weeks before the same hallowed venue opened its doors to the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Crucially, these gatherings are often sponsored by the same AI companies that powered the films in competition. Organized by ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator currently valued at $11 billion, and supported by a platoon of other partners exploring the same tech, the Chroma Awards want to “bridge the gap between Hollywood and Silicon Valley” through an annual short film contest; now at its fourth edition, the AI Film Festival, backed by generative AI giant Runway, was designed to celebrate “a new creative era,” one “made possible when today’s brightest creative minds are empowered with the tools of tomorrow.” Such generic marketing fluff is very much in keeping with these events’ overarching mission: not to promote films, but to “help legitimize those same AI tools” offered by the companies that produced them, John Semley writes of the 2025 AI Film Festival at WIRED. No wonder then that the entries themselves should look like ads. “If there was anything like an aesthetic sensibility shared by the films it was a sense of commercialized gloss: rapid-fire edits, satiny, photorealistic images,” Semley remarks. “A few, like Riccardo Fusetti’s Editorial and Vallée Duhamel’s Fragments of Nowhere, played like perfume ads for a fragrance an android might wear.” Watching AI films on a big screen makes the tech’s flaws and glitches look all the more glaring, Deadline’s Jake Kanter says of the winning shorts of the 2026 Chroma Awards. On the one hand, AI is “not yet mature enough for ambitious ideas;” on the other, “the storytelling skills of these AI creators could not disguise the fact that their films are artificial.” That was early February, just a few days before TikTok’s parent company ByteDance launched Seedance 2.0, and a clip of an AI-generated fistfight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt made with the state-of-the-art tool went viral, prompting Hollywood studios to lash back at what the Motion Picture Association saw as “unauthorised use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale.”John Lennon: The Last Interview (Steven Soderbergh, 2026).So mind-blowingly fast is the speed at which the technology is advancing and reconfiguring the industry that even festivals supposedly critical of its implementation have begun to adjust to the new normal. Take Cannes. “The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup,” Scott Roxborough notes at The Hollywood Reporter. “But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted.” Speaking before throngs of tech evangelists at an “AI for Talent” summit on the Croisette, Darren Aronofsky—who’s embraced generative AI projects through his new studio, Primordial Soup—“described fears that computers would soon replace human storytellers as ‘science fiction,’” Nadia Khomami reports at The Guardian, “and framed the technology as part of cinema’s long technological evolution, comparing it to the arrival of sound, portable cameras and visual effects,” going as far as to predict that “it could create countless jobs.” To boot, the festival’s new official partner, Meta, provided Steven Soderbergh the AI tools to help produce his out of competition entry, John Lennon: The Last Interview (2026). A documentary unearthing the never-before-seen interview Lennon gave just hours before his murder, the project had stirred a hornet’s nest long before its premiere, when Soderbergh—then on a press tour for The Christophers (2025)—told Amy Taubin at Filmmaker Magazine that he’d relied on generative AI to “create thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space,” and would stretch across ten of the doc’s 90 minutes. Mystified by the blowback those comments triggered, Soderbergh doubled down in conversation with Variety’s Brent Lang:I’m just not threatened by [AI]. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do. It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualize what John and Yoko are speaking about philosophically. Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it. I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, “That was a fun phase.” We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to. There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on. Anyone remotely familiar with Soderbergh’s cinema will know that his desire to experiment with new techniques long predates these latest advances. “But just because Soderbergh jumping at AI could be seen from a mile away doesn’t make it any less disappointing, nor does it excuse his reluctance to thoughtfully engage with others’ criticisms about the technology,” Coleman Spilde argues at Salon. A filmmaker of Soderbergh’s stature has the privilege of not feeling threatened by AI, but other creatives and industry professionals without the same clout most certainly do not. So while studios may hail artificial intelligence as a means to democratize cinema and pave the way for filmmakers who wouldn’t otherwise have the budgets to bring their works to life, the truth is that an indiscriminate pivot to AI will obliterate all sorts of creative jobs. That was one of the main concerns behind the 2023 Hollywood strikes, during which the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) joined forces to demand stronger guardrails on the industry’s use of artificial intelligence. Hollywood studios, SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland warned in July that year, had “proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for rest of eternity, on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) called the description a mischaracterization, but nearly three years since the strikes ended, the situation remains murky. “WGA’s current contract, which expires May 1 [2026], established that AI isn’t a writer and nothing it produces is considered literary material,” Cerys Davies observes at the Los Angeles Times. “It prohibits companies from giving writers AI-generated scripts for a rewrite fee or requiring writers to use AI software, and a company must disclose whether any written materials were developed using AI.” In turn, SAG-AFTRA obtained that producers must receive consent from actors to use their digital replicas and clarify how those will be used; even when the work is performed by those avatars, actors are entitled to compensation at their usual fees. Cue Tilly Norwood, a hyperreal twenty-something-looking AI actor created by Xicoia, the AI-division of the London-based production company Particle6, in July last year. Not a mere AI character but “a personality, a brand, and a future global superstar with a compelling narrative arc,” per its creator, Xicoia Chief Executive Eline van der Velden, Tilly stirred new fears among flesh-and-blood actors understandably concerned about the impact that such digital performers might bear on their profession. (For a terrific and terrifying profile of the actress, look no further than Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “interview” at The New York Times). “’Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers—without permission or compensation,” SAG-AFTRA said in a statement. As the union began a new round of negotiations with the AMPTP earlier this year, it was expected that SAG-AFTRA would push to implement the so-called “Tilly Tax,” which would have forced productions using synthetic performers to pay the union the equivalent of what they would have paid a SAG-AFTRA member for the role into a compensation fund—a strategy designed to disincentivize studios from using digital actors to cut costs. None of that survived in the new four-year contract with the AMPTP ratified on June 5. Per the new bylines, producers need only an “articulable business reason” to scan the actors they hire—which they’re not required to disclose—and can also recruit fully synthetic performers like Tilly Norwood so long as they can demonstrate that AI actors can offer “significant additional values” beyond what could have been achieved by a digital replica or a real person. The new deal raises more questions than it provides answers. Just what exactly qualifies as “significant value”? Will studios be required to show they considered real performers before ditching them for synthetic ones? Who decides whether those justifications are convincing enough? But most importantly, what explains the creative industry’s sudden change in attitude toward artificial intelligence?Jia Zhangke's Dance (Jia Zhangke, 2026).“What’s clear is that A.I., the villain of the 2023 strikes and subject of an ever-growing docket of litigation brought by rightsholders against the thieving ghouls of Silicon Valley, has emerged from the shadows to take center stage in Hollywood,” Matthew Belloni reflects at Puck. And for all the human-first platitudes, “whether due to resignation or exhaustion or opportunism, you can kinda feel the creative class in Hollywood shifting its positioning on A.I. from outright resistance to reluctant or cautious accommodation.” It’s not just Hollywood though. In China, Jia Zhangke released an AI-generated 5-minute video at the beginning of the Lunar New Year holidays last February. Made with Seedance 2.0, Jia Zhangke’s Dance (2026) captures two versions of the feted auteur: an age-appropriate Jia, eyes masked behind aviator shades, and a more youthful AI version clad in a spacesuit that spends most of the video waxing lyrical about artificial intelligence while taking the director on a virtual tour of his filmography—a carousel of scenes from Platform (2000) and Still Life (2006), among others. Only at the end does a title card reveal that both versions of Jia’s are entirely synthetic: so genuine looking is the older copy you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for the real deal. It’s worth noting here that China’s approach towards AI has so far proved much more lax than in the States, and government-backed film foundations are planning to use the new tech to revitalize old martial arts classics, Wendy Lee writes at the L.A. Times. Nor is this Jia’s first experiment with artificial intelligence: in 2024, his short Wheat Harvest doubled as a commercial for Kling AI, the software that sponsored it. “I’m not worried about technology ‘replacing’ film,” the director told Variety’s Naman Ramachandran. “From its inception, film has always coexisted with new technologies […] What truly matters is how people use technology.” Nevertheless, “there is a certain perversity about a director whose films have consistently interrogated themes like labor rights and environmental devastation seemingly going all in on AI,” Michael Berry suggests in a formidable piece at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Just how does one reconcile Jia’s career-long interest in authenticity and realism with his pivot to a technology that’s antithetical to those very notions? That was the same cognitive dissonance triggered by Martin Scorsese’s recent partnership with the German AI firm Black Forest. To be clear, the director has revealed he’d used generative AI to produce storyboards only, and there is no suggestion that he’s planning to use synthetic imagery in his works. But it’s nonetheless jarring to hear him claim in a video put out by Black Forest last Tuesday that the tech “conveys a cinematic intelligence,” that “it’s cinema”—all the more so as the statements come from a purist who’s long defended the sacrosanct difference between the seventh art and the soulless, theme-park-like superhero movies that infest multiplexes the world over. “That isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being,” he told Empire in October 2019. That critique of Marvel and co. still stands, but couldn’t the same line apply just as well to the supposed “cinematic intelligence” conveyed by generative AI? It remains to be seen whether Scorsese will end up applying the tools to other aspects of his creative process. But it’s safe to assume that, coming from someone of such renown, his move will only accelerate Hollywood’s adoption of the much-maligned tech. As was expected, the director’s capitulation has already caused a backlash among other professionals. But to demonize filmmakers like Scorsese—or Jia, or Soderbergh—doesn’t seem particularly productive. The real concern here is not that these auteurs will suddenly churn out AI slop. It’s that the industry seems to have surrendered to the idea that artificial intelligence is unavoidable, and that to ignore it is to be locked out of the future. Back in Cannes, Jury member Demi Moore was one of several prominent figures to strike a proselytizing tone when discussing AI: “to fight it is a battle we will lose.” That may be so—cinema, after all, is just one of a myriad other realms the tech is set to drastically change. But there is no creative or moral imperative to submit to the revolution. After all, that’s only just begun, and filmmakers, like AI, are still learning how to employ the new tools in the “right” way—whatever that might be. Whether or not AI will prove “creatively freeing,” as Scorsese has prophesied, it’s up to us—lovers and practitioners of the art—to remain skeptical of the corporate-coded and profit-motivated discourse that’s fueled it, and ensure AI is used to enhance, rather than supersede, creativity.

Схожие новости

#	Наименование новости	Тональность	Информативность	Дата публикации
1	На Украине арестовали экс-главу Апелляционного суда Крыма Чернобука	0	0	05-11-2018
2	Россияне назвали доход, необходимый им для достойной жизни: 50-80 тысяч рублей	0	0	26-04-2021
3	L'OM en route vers la deuxième place : une victoire historique à Angers	0	0	10-02-2025
4	Газинский: сборная России в матче против шведов будет играть только на победу	0	0	19-11-2018
5	В Кузнецке прошел городской конкурс «А ну-ка, парни!»	0	0	21-02-2025
6	☝Мамы, хотите действительно отдохнуть и не думать как накормить любимых, ...	5	6	29-06-2026
7	ABC: Трамп рассматривает возможность отставки главы аппарата Белого дома	0	0	13-11-2018
8	Агидель: Ночь 20 дек, Чт	0	0	19-12-2018
9	El Club Gymcol de Colindres, quinto del campeonato en categoría infantil	0	5	08-05-2026
10	[VK] Центр-Облако	0	0	22-07-2019

Классификация: . Схожих патентов: 0. Схожих новостей: 10. Тональность: 0. Информативность: 11.66. Источник: mubi.com.