Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. Everyone is using it. And almost nobody agrees on what it means for the future of filmmaking.
By The Hollywood Breaking Staff · May 19, 2026 · 11 min read
On the Members Club beach at the Cannes Film Festival last week, a filmmaker wore a pin that read “Fuck AI.” The filmmaker was Todd Mann, co-founder of Flawless — a company that builds AI tools for the entertainment industry. The pin was a conversation starter. It didn’t need to be. Artificial intelligence is the subject Cannes cannot stop talking about in 2026, and the conversation is no longer the one Hollywood was having two years ago. The panic hasn’t vanished. But it has been joined, uneasily, by curiosity — and, in some corners, by quiet adoption on a scale the industry has been reluctant to acknowledge.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival may ultimately be remembered as the moment the global film community stopped asking whether AI would reshape its industry and started grappling, in real time, with the fact that it already has. Symposiums, panels, demonstrations, and heated sidebar debates have filled the festival’s schedule alongside the competition screenings. Steven Soderbergh premiered a documentary that openly uses AI-generated imagery. Peter Jackson compared the technology to the stop-motion puppetry of Ray Harryhausen. Seth Rogen called it the most overrated development he’s ever seen. And behind it all, a much larger and more uncomfortable truth looms: the studios are using far more AI than they’re willing to admit.
The Open Secret
Earlier this year, Janice Min — former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and CEO of Ankler Media — described what she sees as a culture of institutional dishonesty around AI adoption. Studios are underplaying how much they rely on the technology. Creative professionals are hiding their use of AI writing assistants. And the organizations that might enforce transparency have largely adopted what Min characterized as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” posture.
Her claim was blunt: every major studio, every streamer, is integrating AI into its workflows. The tools range from back-end logistics — storyboarding, scheduling, accounting — to more contentious applications like script development assistance and visual effects augmentation. Companies like NewHollywood.com are already working with Disney on practical back-end tools. Meanwhile, the use of generative AI in post-production has become common enough that the lack of controversy this awards season, compared to the uproar over The Brutalist using AI to adjust Adrien Brody’s accent in 2025, struck many observers as a sign not of declining use, but of growing normalization.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has responded — but cautiously. Earlier this month, it announced new guidelines stipulating that only performances “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” will be eligible for acting nominations. The Screen Actors Guild reached a tentative agreement with studios detailing guardrails around digital replicas and synthetic performers. These are meaningful steps. They are also reactive ones, trailing a technology that is moving considerably faster than the institutions designed to govern it.
Soderbergh Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
If the industry’s default mode has been discretion, Steven Soderbergh chose the opposite. His documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview, which premiered at Cannes over the weekend, uses AI-generated images openly — and Soderbergh has been forthright about why.
The film captures the final in-depth conversation John Lennon ever gave, recorded on December 8, 1980, just hours before his assassination. To bring the surviving audio tapes to visual life, Soderbergh employed AI-generated imagery as part of his documentary approach. In interviews, he framed the decision as an act of transparency in an industry that he believes desperately needs it.
The director’s willingness to be, in his own words, “my own whistleblower” stands in sharp contrast to prevailing industry behavior. But it also illustrates the tension at the heart of the debate: Soderbergh is a filmmaker of enormous stature, operating with artistic intent and full disclosure. The more troubling applications — deepfaked celebrity likenesses, unauthorized voice cloning, AI-generated content flooding social platforms — operate without any of those safeguards.
The Seedance Crisis
That tension exploded earlier this year when ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, a video-generation tool that represented a significant leap forward from OpenAI’s Sora. A viral AI-generated video depicting Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in a fictional fight sequence spread across social media at extraordinary speed, accompanied by the now-familiar refrain that “Hollywood is cooked.”
The backlash was swift and institutional. Netflix’s legal team sent a direct warning to ByteDance, declaring that it would not stand by while its intellectual property was treated as “free, public domain clip art.” The Motion Picture Association followed with a cease-and-desist letter alleging that copyright infringement was “a feature, not a bug” of the product. SAG-AFTRA weighed in as well. ByteDance ultimately agreed to implement some guardrails — but the episode exposed how thin the boundary between creative tool and piracy engine had become.
Meanwhile, the venture capital money continues to pour in. Runway AI raised $315 million. Saudi Arabia led a $900 million funding round for Luma. Google, Runway, and ByteDance have all released new generative models this year, each one more capable than the last. The arms race shows no sign of slowing, and the entertainment industry finds itself in the uncomfortable position of simultaneously fighting the technology and investing in it.
The Creators Push Back
Not everyone is softening. Daniel Kwan, co-director of Everything Everywhere All at Once, has continued to sound the alarm. After helping launch the industry-wide Creators Coalition on AI, Kwan told a Sundance panel earlier this year that filmmakers should reject the premise that the technology’s dominance is inevitable. “Filmmakers, you are experts,” he said. “We cannot allow the tech industry to set the terms for our industry.”
Justine Bateman, the actress and technologist who served as a guild adviser during the 2023 strikes, has taken the resistance further. Her organization Credo23, which provides a seal of approval certifying that creative work was produced without AI, held its second “No AI” film festival in Hollywood in March. The event drew major names, including Sean Baker, Gus Van Sant, and Matthew Weiner.
On the other side, Peter Jackson — fresh off receiving an Honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes — offered a characteristically pragmatic view. The director, who has spent decades at the cutting edge of visual effects technology, compared AI to every filmmaking tool that preceded it. Some people will use it to create extraordinary work. Others will produce garbage. The technology itself, he suggested, is morally neutral. What matters is the imagination behind it. He did, however, draw a clear line on one issue: using someone’s likeness without consent should be treated exactly like using a song without licensing it.
The Real Battle Lines
The divide in Hollywood is not cleanly between pro-AI and anti-AI camps. It is between those who see the technology as an assistive tool — useful for storyboarding, scheduling, post-production refinement, and other functions that don’t replace human creativity — and those who see it as a mechanism for replacing human labor at scale, driven by corporations whose primary interest is cost reduction.
That distinction matters enormously, because it determines who benefits. If AI remains a tool in the hands of directors, editors, and visual effects artists, it could genuinely lower barriers to entry and accelerate creative workflows. If it becomes a substitute for those roles — if studios use it to eliminate jobs rather than augment them — the consequences for an already battered workforce will be severe.
The evidence suggests both things are happening simultaneously. Support staff, confronted with larger workloads and shrinking headcounts, have folded AI into their daily routines out of necessity. Screenwriters, despite public resistance, are privately using chatbots for brainstorming and feedback. Visual effects houses are integrating generative tools to meet deadlines that human labor alone cannot satisfy. The adoption is real. The discomfort is also real. And the lack of clear rules means the industry is essentially running a live experiment on itself.
What James Gray Thinks You Should Do About It
Amid the panels and the position papers and the corporate posturing, it was James Gray — the director whose Paper Tiger has been one of Cannes’ most acclaimed competition entries — who offered perhaps the most grounded perspective. Gray said he isn’t worried about AI replacing filmmakers. Not in his lifetime, and not in his children’s.
“In some cases, it can be a very helpful tool,” he said. “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.”
His advice to young people navigating an industry in flux was characteristically old-school and entirely sincere: study the humanities. Read Tolstoy. Understand the human soul. The machines can generate images and arrange words and simulate emotion. But storytelling, Gray argued, is something else entirely — something that emerges from lived experience, moral complexity, and the irreducible strangeness of being human.
Whether that faith is warranted — whether the soul truly is beyond the reach of silicon — remains an open question. But at a festival defined by the collision between technology and artistry, it was a reminder of what the debate is ultimately about: not the tools, but the stories they are used to tell, and the people who tell them.
Key Developments at a Glance
- Academy Guidelines — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled that only performances “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” are eligible for acting nominations.
- SAG-AFTRA Agreement — A tentative deal with studios establishes guardrails around digital replicas and synthetic performers.
- Seedance 2.0 Backlash — Netflix and the MPA sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance after its video-generation tool was used to create unauthorized deepfake content featuring A-list actors.
- Soderbergh’s Transparency — The director openly used AI-generated images in his Cannes documentary about John Lennon, calling for industry-wide honesty about adoption.
- Credo23 Movement — Justine Bateman’s “No AI” certification program and film festival continues to draw major creative talent, including Sean Baker and Gus Van Sant.
- VC Arms Race — Runway AI raised $315M, Luma secured $900M in Saudi-led funding, and Google, ByteDance, and others released new generative models in 2026.
Hollywood Breaking will continue to cover the intersection of artificial intelligence and the entertainment industry. The AI debate at Cannes concludes with the festival’s closing ceremony on May 23.
