Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, any mention of “artificial intelligence” was made with a kind of hushed, almost guilty sense of secrecy – these were taboo conversations to be conducted as far away from the red carpets and press-junket suites as possible. At this year’s edition, though, AI enjoyed its unofficial coming out party, with the technology – and its supposed potential to completely upend the film industry for the better – impossible to avoid, no matter how AI-skeptical your sentiments.

At the Marché du Film, a week-long gauntlet of meetings and industry panels that runs parallel to the official festival, the convention space inside the basement of the Grand Palais hub was so jammed with buyers and sellers touting their various AI-assisted projects that you’d be forgiven for thinking that traditional filmmaking, such as it is, was simply no longer in fashion.

On the market floor, trade magazines including Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were littered with ads for such companies as InevitAble, the “human-first AI cinema studio,” which promises to make your next blockbuster for just $300,000. Meanwhile, the L.A.-based sales and financing giant AGC Studios was shopping the AI-produced animated film Critterz, a “human-led but AI-assisted” family flick that boasted ties to industry giant OpenAI. And such well-known filmmakers as Roger Avary (who co-wrote Pulp Fiction and directed The Rules of Attraction), Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City), and Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, The Whale) were busy prowling the French Riviera, hyping up their new AI-assisted genre projects.

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“Quite rightly there’s a huge amount of both curiosity but also caution around AI, and we believe that Critterz is going about the process in the right way, because it is very much human-led, creatively,” Stuart Ford, chief executive of AGC, said in an interview with The Globe. “It was imagined by humans, it was written by humans, the characters were designed by humans, it will be scored by a human, it will be edited by a human. The use of AI is just to do the heavy lifting of the animation. We hope that distributors will really rally behind this, because our sense is that this is a film going down the correct path for AI and cinema.”

That path was the focus of the Marché’s own two-day AI for Talent Summit, which expanded on last year’s inaugural single-day edition to bring together leading figures from the entertainment and tech sectors to discuss practical applications of AI in filmmaking.

“Industry professionals can have very different opinions on AI, and our responsibility is to provide a platform where these debates can take place openly and constructively,” said Guillaume Esmiol, executive director of the Marché du Film. “AI generates both excitement and concerns within the film industry. Our mission is to help professionals better understand how these technologies work, to showcase concrete filmmaking use cases, and to address the major questions they raise, especially around intellectual property rights and authors’ remuneration.”

As to whether there were more AI-assisted projects being shopped on the Cannes market this year than ever before, Esmiol cautioned that the notion of “AI cinema” itself needs to be more clearly defined – which is partially what the Marché’s summit was designed to achieve.

“What exactly qualifies as an ‘AI-assisted’ film? Does it refer only to production and postproduction tools? Does it include scriptwriting support? And to what extent?” Esmiol said. “Using AI to check the wording of a sentence is very different from having large portions of a screenplay generated by AI. … The conversation is therefore becoming less about whether AI is used or not, and more about how it is used, with what intention, and under what creative and ethical framework.”

The AI enthusiasm spread beyond the Marché, though. The tech behemoth Meta, which has gone all-in on AI, was an official sponsor of the festival itself, hosting an invite-only pop-up at the ritzy Majestic Hotel to showcase its new Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. The company also partnered with acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh for his new documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview, which uses AI to produce what the director calls “thematic surrealism,” and which played in the festival’s “special screenings” program.

Cannes jury member Demi Moore, meanwhile, kicked off the festival with a stir when she declared during the opening press conference that any industry fight against AI was, essentially, over before it really began.

“I always feel that against-ness breeds against-ness,” the actress said. “AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to find ways in which we can work with it, I think, is a more valuable path to take.”

AI was also being employed in at least one of the festival’s official competition films, albeit in a nearly imperceptible way.

For the James Gray crime thriller Paper Tiger, the L.A.-based Zoic Studios worked on a sequence, using proprietary AI technology built inside an established visual-effects pipeline. The goal: to modify the wardrobe of actor Miles Teller to ensure continuity after it was decided during editing that two separately shot scenes needed to be stitched together.

“It’s a visual effects artist’s tool. We don’t look at it in the sense that it’s going to replace artists, or change how we do things – it’s going to enhance how we do things,” said Zoic co-founder Chris Jones, who noted that the task would have taken one to two weeks’ worth of manual labour, but was completed in only a few days with AI. “In cases like this, there are substantial savings.”

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Indeed, in terms of key words, the conversation around AI at Cannes seemed to revolve around just one: money.

“The biggest shift has been how AI is helping facilitate and create better production plans, ultimately reducing costs by as much as half,” said Roeg Sutherland, co-head of media finance at the Hollywood agency giant CAA. “You can’t ignore AI, because it’s becoming part of our daily life. If we can make five movies instead of one, then that is better for the business overall.”

Not every filmmaker at Cannes, though, agreed with the predominantly pro-AI sentiment.

“With this film, I got ChatGPT to have a read of my screenplay to give some feedback just as an experiment,” said director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose new movie Sheep in the Box, following a grieving couple who replace their deceased son with an AI-developed robot, premiered in the festival’s official competition. “And I prefer the feedback that comes from seeing the actors on set and doing the editing myself and seeing how things can work better, that kind of organic process. I don’t think there’s room for AI in that process.”

Indeed, as much as splashy AI-forward events dominated the festival – from the insiders-only party hosted by AI giant Anthropic alongside former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to the yacht soirees in which producers sold visions of an AI-inevitable future – there were also moments of passionate dissent.

Soderbergh’s Lennon doc, which the director defended by saying that AI was employed “essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology,” received some of the very worst reviews of the filmmaker’s storied career. (“The appallingly ugly AI-generated imagery only highlights the project’s flimsy reason to exist,” declared IndieWire.)

Meanwhile, Cate Blanchett unveiled her decidedly AI-skeptical non-profit RSL Media initiative, built around the concept of human consent when it comes to performers and any AI usage. And such leading industry figures as Tilda Swinton planted their own anti-slop flags in the ground.

“As long as what we’re not producing is formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn’t have a chance,” Swinton said during an onstage discussion. “What we need to do is what only humans can do: Make messy, adventurous experiences so that an audience does not know what’s coming next.”