Peter Jackson honoured, Demi Moore on AI: inside Cannes opening day

The backlash to the actress’s Cannes comments reveals how conversations about artificial intelligence keep collapsing into shallow pro- and anti-AI tribalism.

US actor says working with the technology is better than fighting a losing battle against it Demi Moore has urged her peers not to resist the rise of artificial intelligence, saying “to fight it is a battle we will lose”. The actor, who is a member of the Cannes film festival jury, was asked during a press conference on Tuesday how AI was affecting the industry and whether she believed more regulation was needed. Continue reading...

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival opens Tuesday with 22 films vying for the prestigious Palme d'Or. The off-screen discourse this year is dominated by a dispute over AI, with festival director Thierry Frémaux and thousands of French actors and filmmakers warning about its effects on the industry. Despite the absence of Hollywood studio giants such as Disney or Warner, there will be no shortage of celeb A-listers on the Croisette this year.

Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary wants to bring the epic poem to the big screen using the power of artificial intelligence. It can’t be any good The thing about unfilmable works of literature is that most of them eventually turn out to be quite filmable after all. The Lord of the Rings was a bit of a mess when shot in rotoscope on a minuscule budget by the guy who filmed Fritz the Cat; it won Oscars when handed to Peter Jackson, given the GDP of a small nation and a visual effects department the size of Gondor. The 1984 version of Dune was a disappointment, despite the presence of David Lynch in the director’s chair, largely because all that gleaming, tawdry galactic opulence couldn’t make up for the comprehensively bad acting, clotted exposition and obsession with freaky heart plugs. And yet the 2021 adaptation from Denis Villeneuve ended up being a tour de force of masterly restraint and monolithic scale. Milton’s Paradise Lost? The 17th-century epic poem has always felt like an ou

While emerging technology is banned from the Palme d’Or, an upstart movement is gaining investment and attention In Cannes’ darkened screening rooms, the supposed future of cinema flickered into life this week and it was strange. The first edition of the World AI film festival (WAIFF) showcased visions of men with fish scales erupting from their necks and seaweed from their mouths, a heroine with a heart beating outside her body and so many massed armies of AI-generated tanned men sweeping across battlefields that David Lean would have blushed. Last week the Cannes film festival, entering its 76th year, banned the emerging technology from its Palme d’Or competition, insisting “AI imitates very well but it will never feel deep emotions”. But this week the Croisette was taken over by the upstart AI film movement and their big-tech backers amid increasing investment and attention from the Hollywood studios. A “nouvelle vague”, they said, is coming. Continue reading...

Elon Musk did not appear on Monday for a voluntary interview with Paris prosecutors, who had issued the summons in February as part of an investigation into allegations that X's algorithm was used to interfere in French politics. The probe was later expanded to include dissemination of Holocaust denial and sexual deepfakes by X's AI chatbot Grok. FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney speaks with Professor Julia Hörnle, Chair of Internet Law at Queen Mary University of London.