May 20, 2024

Annecy Film Festival responds to criticism to choose films made in part with AI Technology

This year's Annecy Animation Festival has gained some heat to embrace the Japanese feature in a contest that uses AI software produced as part of the production process. The festival issued a statement defending the inclusion of the film in its program.

Ryo Nakajima's 68-minute film "Said Death is Beautiful -" will debut at the film festival's Midnight Special Selection.

A trailer for the movie can be seen below:

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The filmmaker explains on his website the techniques used to make the film. These technologies include AI, VR, motion capture, and virtual camera shooting on iPad. The selected AI software was stable and popular, but it seems that it was mainly used for lighting after the core cg image was created from the making video posted by the creator. Japanese speakers will be able to better understand this description of the film's production process:

While the film doesn't appear to contain generative AI images, there has been a lot of online debate about the ethics of distributing products like stability AI's Stable Diffusion.It has been hit with several class action lawsuits, including one from the Visual Arts community, whose products are created by theft or plagiarism of others' jobs.

A representative discussion of Annecy's acceptance of the film can be found in this Linkedin post.

Marcel Jean, Artistic Director of the Annecy Festival, issued a statement comparing AI to previous discussions about including computer animation and pixilation in the program's lineup. However, this explanation does not address the core of the problem that stable diffusion is an illegally created product that exists only through the theft of someone else's work.

Here Jean's statement is complete:

We have always declared that the Annecy Festival should provide a global overview of animated films"."This year we received dozens of applications using artificial intelligence in some way. We felt it was important to select some of these works so that discussions and discussions about artificial intelligence were not limited theoretically or hypothetically, but focused on specific specific applications. Most of all, we believe that the presence of creators using these tools is essential for discussion [sic] is to exist.

Festivals like Annecy are not based on a dogmatic approach, nor have they ever been. 45 years ago, some festival participants and commentators resented Zbigniew Rybczy?Ski's film "Tango" won the Grand Prix, claiming it was not animation. Today this film is considered one of the great masterpieces of animated films. About 20 years later, controversy broke out about movies using 3d software. Today, it's AI, the new bugbear. This technological breakthrough may not be like its predecessor. We need to ask questions and arguments are important, but we believe that we need to learn more about these works in order to have an intellectual argument. This is why they were shortlisted.