AI in Movies Can’t Win the Oscars… But There’s a Catch

AI actors have become a thing, some of them completely non-existent, and some generated based on our beloved actors who have left us. As this has been happening, we started wondering – what about the Oscars? Well, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has updated its eligibility rules to explicitly state that only human acting and writing can be nominated for an Oscar. In other words, no AI acting or writing can win the award. But what about other AI stuff? Well, if you’re strictly anti-AI, you won’t like it.

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In the requirements, the Academy itself is described as a “substantive” change. The organization specified that acting must be “demonstrably performed by humans” and that writing “must be human-authored” to qualify for a nomination. The need to clarify this at all is new… And quite terrifying. I feel like I’m living in a Terminator movie or a Black Mirror episode.

Anyhow, the update comes as AI use in film has grown into something impossible to ignore. I recently wrote about Val Kilmer being recreated via generative AI for the upcoming As Deep as the Grave. Sure, it’s a case with family consent, SAG compliance, and the actor’s own prior relationship with AI technology behind it. But it still unsettles me deeply and raises tons of questions, both ethical and purely technical. One of the technical ones is, apparently, the one about the Oscars. Well, it seems that the Academy is now drawing at least one firm line in response to cases like this one.

The Catch

So, acting and writing are not eligible for an Oscar if there’s any generative AI in there. However, the Academy seems to allow it in other areas, like special effects. “The Academy and each branch will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award,” the organization wrote, as reported by the BBC. AI tools used elsewhere in production “neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination,” they added. And if questions arise, “the Academy reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use and human authorship.”

It sounds to me like filmmakers can use AI instead of CGI, for example (at least up to a point, I guess). But here’s why I don’t like this at all. CGI has generally been treated as a manual craft. Humans are the ones doing painstaking work to create visual elements. AI tools automate that work through simple prompts, and while it speeds up the process, I wonder how much human element is still in there? I mean, aside from human artwork that the algorithms have been trained on.

The announcement lands amid ongoing copyright lawsuits from Hollywood studios, actors, artists, and authors against AI companies, as well as the Writers Guild strike two years ago, where AI-generated scripts were a central point of contention.

For now, the Oscars have made their position clear: the Awards recognize human achievement in writing and acting. What happens outside that… Well, it looks like a wide-open territory.

[Via BBC; Lead image credits: Sourcearchive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

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