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.

Mathieu Kassovitz, who is currently working on an AI-enabled film, also dismisses concerns over copyright

His hit film was a masterpiece capturing the gritty truth of the Paris suburbs, but the director of La Haine is now sold on an AI-generated future for cinema.

Mathieu Kassovitz has called the technology the “the last artistic tool we need” and dismissed concerns about AI stealing other artists’ intellectual property, telling the Guardian: “Fuck copyright.”

French musician’s comments are in stark contrast to fears expressed by artists such as Elton John and Dua Lipa

Jean-Michel Jarre has attacked the conservatism of the music and film industries over AI and urged them to embrace the technology instead of being fearful and “very anti-AI”.

Jarre, one of the pioneers of electronic music in the 1970s, said while the existing creative industries were “freaking out” over the technology, artists would use AI “to create the cinema of tomorrow, the hip-hop of tomorrow, the techno of tomorrow, the rock’n’roll of tomorrow”.