The Cannes Festival has been the stage in which world cinema shows its most ambitious, most risky, most uncomfortable works for more than seventy years. It has screened films banned in their countries of origin, it has rewarded directors marginalized by their own industries, it has given visibility to voices that would otherwise have gone nowhere. It is not, in that sense, a particularly conservative festival in terms of content.
And yet, the decision to screen in 2026—for the first time in its history—a project generated entirely with artificial intelligence generated discomfort in the film community that not even the most intense controversies of recent years had caused. Not because of the content itself - although that was also a reason for debate - but because of what the presence of that project in the halls of the Palais des Festivals represents for the future of the industry.
The project: erotic magazines from the 70s animated by AI
The nature of the project did not exactly simplify the debate. The streaming platform Cultpix presented a work generated with AI based on images and illustrations from erotic magazines from approximately fifty years ago. The static images were animated, provided with movement and visual context using generative artificial intelligence tools.
Cultpix CEO and co-founder Rickard Gramfors explained that the decision to use AI responded to a deliberately provocative purpose: to generate a debate about the perception of images that are half a century old. Their argument was that what was considered scandalous adult material in the '70s seems today, by today's visual standards, surprisingly innocent. AI, in that context, was a tool to create a dialogue between the bold aesthetics of the past and new technologies.
It is an argument that has a certain intellectual sophistication, but that can also be read as a retroactive justification of the type "all publicity is good publicity." The project generated headlines around the world, which was probably the main goal.
AI did not triumph at Cannes despite the controversy. He triumphed thanks to her. And that raises uncomfortable questions about what kind of works will find their way to prestigious festivals in the coming years.
The reaction of the film industry
The response from film professionals—directors, scriptwriters, actors, technicians—has been mostly rejection, although with important nuances. The Hollywood Screenwriters Union, which has been negotiating with studios for two years on the conditions of use of AI in film production, described the project's presence in Cannes as "premature normalization" of a technology whose implications for workers in the sector have not been negotiated or regulated.
Older film directors have been especially critical. Cinema, they argue, is not just the final image: it is the decision-making process that it involves, the collaboration between people with different visions and interpretations, the creative tension between the director and the actors, between the scriptwriter and the director of photography, between the intention and the unforeseen result. A work generated by AI lacks that process, and therefore lacks something fundamental, although the visual result may be technically impressive.
But there are dissident voices, especially among younger directors and those working on the margins of experimental cinema. For them, AI is simply another tool, like the 16mm camera, digital video, or computer visual effects were at the time. Each new imaging technology was met with skepticism by the custodians of cinematic tradition, and each ended up being incorporated into the vocabulary of cinema without destroying it.
The problem of credit and authorship in cinema generated by AI
One of the most specific debates that the Cannes project has reopened is that of credits. How is authorship attributed to a work generated by AI? In the case of Cultpix, the credit goes to the company and its founders as "authors" of the project. But the AI tools that generated the animated images were trained, in almost all cases, on millions of images created by artists, photographers, animators and filmmakers who did not give explicit consent for their work to be used as training data.
This problem—which in the world of visual art and illustration has been generating class action lawsuits against companies such as Stability AI and Midjourney for years—acquires visibility in the context of Cannes that it had not had before. The most prestigious festival in world cinema not only hosted the project: it gave it a platform that amounts to institutional validation. For visual artists and animators who feel that their works were used without compensation to train the models that generated that film, that validation is a direct affront.
AI in cinema: the state of the debate in 2026
- Hollywood continues to negotiate the limits of the use of AI in scripts and post-production
- Several European festivals have announced that they will not accept works generated entirely by AI
- Cannes does not (yet) have an explicit policy on AI works
- Artist class action lawsuits against AI image generators continue
- AI is already widely used in post-production, visual effects and dubbing
What makes a movie a movie?
Deep down, the presence of the AI work in Cannes raises the same question that underlies all the controversies about artificial creativity: what makes an artistic work valuable? If the value is in the result—in the emotions it provokes, in the questions it opens, in the experience it creates in the viewer—then AI can produce valuable works. If the value is in the process—in the human effort, in the intention, in the life experience that the artist pours into the work—then AI cannot produce art in any meaningful sense, but only simulations of art.
Cannes, when screening the Cultpix project, did not take an explicit position in this debate. But by giving him space, he implicitly signaled that the question deserves to be asked in his chambers. That, at least, is consistent with the historical function of the festival: to be the place where cinema faces its most uncomfortable questions.
What's coming now is more complicated. If Cannes does not establish a clear policy on AI works, it risks becoming a showcase for projects that use AI provocation as a marketing strategy rather than genuine artistic exploration. If you set it and exclude AI works, you face very difficult questions about where to draw the line: Does a movie with AI-generated visual effects not count? A movie with a script co-written with AI? A film with synthetic actors in supporting roles?
The broader context: The 79th edition of the festival also screened a restored copy of Ken Russell's "The Devils" (1971), a film that was censored in multiple countries for its content on religion and sexuality. The choice to program both works in the same edition – a controversy from the past and a controversy from the present – hardly seems accidental.
Cinema has been reinventing itself for more than a hundred years in the face of each new technological challenge. Sound, color, digital, computer effects: every time the industry said that technology was going to kill something essential about cinema, cinema found a way to incorporate that technology and continue being cinema. AI is probably no exception. But the speed at which it is evolving, and the radicality with which it questions the notion of authorship, make this transition something qualitatively different from previous ones. Cannes 2026 was not the answer to that transition. It was just the first chapter of a conversation that will take years.
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