The Cannes Film Festival has signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with social networking giant and AI investment giant Meta, the company announced on Monday, despite concerns about the impact new video tools will have on the film industry.
Meta said in a statement that it is “proud to become an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival in a new multi-year strategic partnership” on behalf of social video platform TikTok.
The group will hold a series of promotional events for Ray-Ban Meta, video-enabled glasses that are growing in popularity among influencers but have raised privacy concerns.
The company will also showcase new artificial intelligence-powered video generation technology that Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, the director of Traffic, used in his latest film.
Soderbergh has teamed up with Mehta to produce a documentary about Beatles songwriter John Lennon’s last interview before his death, which will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film, which features AI-generated footage of John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, has become a hot topic in an industry that sees the technology not only as a danger to copyright and original storytelling, but also as a threat to jobs.
Soderbergh told Deadline last week that the AI-generated video made up about 10% of the film and was used for “sequences that contained images that were impossible to shoot.”
The use of AI was central to the 2023 strike that shut down Hollywood, as actors and screenwriters warned that unchecked technology threatened their livelihoods.
Thousands of French actors and filmmakers warned in an open letter in February that AI tools were “looting” talent across the industry, likening them to a “devouring hydra”.
The Cannes Film Festival opens on Tuesday and runs until May 23rd.
