FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – At the Cannes Film Festival, AI is on everyone’s lips. For Laurent Sorbier, it is not the gravedigger of cinema but represents the possibility of pushing artistic creation even further.
Laurent Sorbier taught the digital economics of cultural industries for 15 years at Sciences Po and the University of Paris-Dauphine. He is Vice-President in charge of the public sector at Keyrus.
AI is everywhere at Cannes this year. Omnipresent on the screens, discreet in the spotlight, not yet on the red carpet, but she is already the star of the moment in every conversation. This year it is the subject that few dare to discuss in public but that everyone talks about in private. It worries the technicians and panics the actors. It makes producers dream. It destabilizes experienced directors and sometimes enthuses their young successors.
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AI is no longer the subject of speculation. It’s a fait accompli. Almost all films in competition have probably used AI at at least one stage of their production, the effects of blockbusters presented out of competition certainly integrate generative models, its impact on production and post-production costs is beginning to be truly measured.
According to a report from Bain & Company, published in the Hollywood Reporter, new production technologies (AI preview, game engines, LED walls) can save 5 to 10% on a $50 million film, up to 20% on a $100 million film, and $30 to $40 million on a blockbuster. 200 million dollars.
What divides is no longer “should we use it?” but “how far can we use it without betraying what cinema is?” She restored film: archives of which AI has reconstructed the erased details, inventing what time had destroyed. She also retouched the faces: not with digital brushstrokes like yesterday, but by latent diffusion, pixel by pixel, with astonishing precision.
AI contributed to editing: automatic analysis of rushes and suggested sequences compressing working time.
Laurent Sorbier
She dubbed the voices: not the approximate subtitling of five years ago, but synthetic performances which preserve the grain, the accent, the emotion. She created extras: mass scenes populated by faces that do not exist, generated by model, animated without the intervention of a technician. She also contributed to editing: automatic analysis of rushes and suggestions for sequences compressing working time.
There is no longer any doubt that actors will have to learn to live tomorrow in a new and strange symbiosis, artistic and economic, with their digital clones. During their lifetime and perhaps post-mortem, like Val Kilmer, resurrected on the poster of a film with an evocative name, As Deep as the Grave (2026). This year, Cannes is the place where all the ambivalence of the relationship between cinema and AI can be seen.
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A month ago, it welcomed the 2,000 participants of the World AI Film Festival: 1,500 films from 85 countries, under the presidency of Gong Li, Claude Lelouch being honorary president. The motto of the festival: “AI does not destroy creativity, it stimulates it.»
But on the other hand, last Saturday, May 16, the Minister of Culture, Catherine Pégard, also announced that aid from the CNC will henceforth be reserved for works created by humans, after having imposed that assisted dubbing only use actors in the flesh. in bones. Decision which echoes that of the Academy of Oscars, at the beginning of May, to ban from competition films with actors and scenarios generated by AI, knee-jerk reaction to the “Val Kilmer affair”.
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Why so much hatred, some will say? Because cinema is experiencing, as photography experienced yesterday, its “Photoshop moment”: at what point does digital recreation become an imposture? An actor “rejuvenated” by AI: is this still his performance? A setting that is only made of pixels: is this still artistic direction? The reconstructed voice of an actor or the scenes performed by his digital clone: is it still a game?
AI does not threaten the essence of cinema. It threatens what cinema claims to be: a mirror – dreamed of course, but an exact mirror nonetheless – of reality. HAS”Cinema is the truth twenty-four times per second“, affirmed Godard. We are only at the credits of the adventure of AI and cinema.
Far from these states of mind, China is the laboratory for the meeting between cinema and AI. According to an article from New York Times As of May 3, China is producing a phenomenal volume of AI content: nearly 50,000 new AI-generated micro-dramas were uploaded to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) in March 2026 alone, almost as many as the total for the entire year 2025. SF feature film entirely produced by IA, “Sanxingdui: Future Memories“, has just been released in theaters in China, the first of its kind. The entire Chinese ecosystem has embraced AI, not as a marginal tool, but as the heart of the creative process.
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Beyond the legitimate concerns that any major technological breakthrough gives rise to, let us dare to believe that AI will offer the coming generation – and not only in China, we must hope – a radically new and fruitful way of telling stories in images. And perhaps it will open the doors of cinematic creation more widely to directors who will not be deterred either by the cost or the complexity of traditional production.
AI is just a new magic trick, more sophisticated and credible, but not fundamentally different from what Lumiére and Méliès did 130 years ago: giving life to a brilliant imposture by making us believe what we know to be false. AI will not be the gravedigger of cinema. She will continue to invite herself to Cannes, whether we roll out the red carpet for her or not, and let’s bet that she will be at home there, as an ally of cinema, in the decades to come.
