AI crashes Cannes as Hollywood watches nervously

Summarised by Centrist

A fully AI-generated feature film has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, sharpening debate over how quickly artificial intelligence could reshape Hollywood.

Hell Grind, a 95-minute action-adventure film made by San Francisco startup Higgsfield AI, was produced in just two weeks for about US$500,000. Around 80 per cent of that budget went on AI compute costs.

Every character, setting and prop in the film was generated by AI, with the project serving partly as a showcase for Higgsfield’s technology.

The company’s creative team said traditional filmmaking skills still mattered. “You still need those filmmaking skills,” said Higgsfield content lead Adil Alimzhanov, who worked on the movie.

The process was far from simple. Each AI prompt produced only about 15 seconds of footage, and each clip had to be repeatedly generated and refined. The first 25 minutes of the film required 16,181 initial video generations, which were cut down to 253 final shots.

Maintaining consistency was one of the biggest challenges. Prompts often ran to around 3,000 words and included detailed instructions on lighting, camera style, physical realism and movement.

Alimzhanov said many clips were discarded over tiny visual flaws, including problems with a character’s facial movement or camera direction.

“You can’t go into AI and say make me a 95-minute cool video,” he said.

The film arrives as the mood around AI in cinema appears to be shifting from fear to guarded acceptance. Actress Demi Moore told Cannes attendees: “AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose.”

Read more over at The Wall Street Journal

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