From Hollywood to Cannes
Looking back at 2023, Hollywood's biggest strike in more than six decades has paralyzed the US film industry. Besides benefits from online platforms, AI has become a spark, causing tens of thousands of screenwriters and actors to take to the streets. They oppose film studios using AI to exploit scripts or digitize actors' images without satisfactory consent.
3 years later, at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, AI continued to be the focus of fierce controversy. Director Darren Aronofsky considered AI as a new tool to expand the scope of creativity rather than replacing artists. Meanwhile, prodigy Guillermo del Toro strongly opposed the assimilation of generative AI with artistic creation, emphasizing that the tool can never become a creator.
In fact, this is not the first time cinema has faced a technological revolution. Muted films once gave way to famous films, black and white films to color films, mechanical effects to digital effects... But all of that past only changed the way of storytelling, not replaced the storyteller.
Algorithms and risks from optimization
But AI is different. For the first time, technology stepped straight into the core of creativity. AI can propose script ideas, build storyboards, create settings, build trailers, voice acting, and even create unprecedented characters. Algorithms are present in most stages from pre-production to post-production. The question is: How will cinema change when algorithms no longer stand behind the scenes but start stepping onto the main stage?
From an economic perspective, AI helps reduce production time, save costs and opens up opportunities for independent filmmakers to realize ideas beyond their financial capacity. That is an undeniable step forward.
But art is not created by performance. A film does not become a masterpiece because it is made faster or cheaper. What makes cinema live long in public memory is the ability to touch very human experiences such as loss, loneliness, hope or inner conflicts, which no algorithm can measure by data.
Therefore, what worries many filmmakers is not that AI makes films better than humans. But that humans will gradually make films in the way of AI.
The algorithm works based on past data. It learns from millions of scripts, thousands of successful movies to find the formula with the highest probability of attracting audiences. Commercially, that's an advantage. But if all creative decisions are led by what data considers "effective", cinema is very likely to fall into the loop of safe patterns like a twist right at the 45th minute; a climax scene right when audiences start to lose focus; a sufficiently touching ending to spread on social media. All can be optimized.
But art has never been born from optimization. Great films change film history because they dare to break the formula. No algorithm accurately predicts the appearance of a masterpiece, because algorithms only see what has existed, while art always starts from something unprecedented.
Perhaps because of this, the biggest question AI raises for cinema is not whether machines can replace humans or not. But when everything can be calculated, will cinema still be brave enough to accept imperfection, which is the starting point of all creation?
Many people believe that audiences will refuse "AI actors". That may be true at present, but who knows, what the public opposes today may be accepted by them tomorrow. From color films, digital effects to online platforms, all were once doubted but ultimately welcomed, as long as the work is persuasive enough.
Therefore, the issue is not whether AI is used or not, but what we want it to replace. If AI is used to restore old films, support special effects and reduce cost pressure for young directors, it is a positive thing. But the downside will come when technology is used to standardize emotions, mold safe scripts or create perfect faces optimized according to the market, which means the disappearance of creative personality.
Life experiences that cannot be "downloaded
An actor not only brings a face to the film crew. They bring age, life experience, scratches of experience and even life events. These invisible things create the core difference. Two actors say the same line, cry in the same scene, but bring two completely different emotional shocks.
AI can recreate faces, simulate voices and memorize expressions. But life experiences cannot be downloaded as software.
Cinema, after all, has never been the art of inanimate pixels. It is the art of humans telling stories about humans. What makes the audience shed tears is not how perfect the character shed tears, but the strong belief that that pain has been truly tasted by a human being.
Cinema always develops thanks to those who dare to go against the formula. Every masterpiece was once a risky gamble, because no past data can prove that a completely new idea will succeed. If all artistic decisions in the future have to go through the "filter" of algorithms, we may have more blockbuster movies, but surely there will be fewer works that change the way we see the world.
Land of imperfections
AI will certainly become part of the future of cinema. No one can reverse the wheel of technology. But the ultimate decision-maker must be human. Machines can help us go faster, do more and save more, but the biggest challenge of the seventh art in the digital age is not the battle to preserve livelihoods or the status of an artist, but to protect the right to be creative with intuition, with life experience and even mistakes.
It is these imperfections that are where art begins.
Finally, this is not a competition to see who makes the most aesthetic film. It is a battle to preserve the core, making cinema become cinema. The ability of a human to use his own heart and unique experience to touch the hearts of other people. That land, to this day, is still inviolable to all algorithms.
