AI filmmakers gathered at NFC Lisbon for the AI Film Academy’s inaugural AIFA Awards this week, recognizing the “extraordinary diversity of stories and the radically new visual language of AI.”
The AImagine Award for Best Film went to “Denny the Shark,” created by collaborative duo Ethereal Moon, which is made up of Melody Bossan (aka LeMoon) and Dina Lockamy (aka Ethereal Gwirl).
Bossan said that using AI has revitalized her “faded dream of becoming a filmmaker,” adding that she and Lockamy were “both stay-at-home mothers when we discovered AI art and were immediately hooked.”
Bossan and Lockamy are “a classic example of a huge sector of the world who are excluded from this fast paced, cutthroat industry,” AI Film Academy co-founder Leo Crane told Decrypt. He added that, “We're trying to prove this idea that the emerging technology opens up the field on a global scale.”
The event also saw the launch of the AI Film Academy, a body aimed at “democratizing the film industry” through AI and blockchain technologies.
“It's a global institution for the future of film,” said AI Film Academy co-founder Clare Maguire. “We essentially wanted to deliver a message to show how much potential there is in this new technology, so that we can help to stop the fear, and support and encourage positive adoption.”
AIFA Awards hosts Clare Maguire and Leo Crane with Dyland Balquiee from Muse Frames. Image: AI Film Academy/Paige Powell
AI and the film industry
AI has proved to be a divisive topic in the film industry, with battle lines being drawn up between those who embrace the technology and those who argue it threatens artists’ livelihoods and relies on plagiarism.
Negotiations to resolve last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes hinged on provisions to regulate the use of AI in the film industry, while actors have reported losing jobs to AI-generated performances. There’s been pushback from audiences, too, with the directors of horror film “Late Night With the Devil” forced to defend their use of AI-generated art after the film's page on review site Letterboxd was flooded with negative comments.
Earlier this month, actor Scarlett Johansson lawyered up, accusing AI firm OpenAI of using a soundalike voice for its GPT-4o model after she’d turned down its requests to use her voice.
It turns out all the jokes about the sci-fi movie AI companion “Her“—which even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman encouraged—were no laughing matter.
After OpenAI released its multimodal language model GPT-4o touting its ability to interact via voice, the company Monday announced that it is pausing the development of the voice named “Sky.” The decision had come amid a wave of suggestive comments, memes, and comparisons to the “Her” character, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Within hours, the actress released...
Johannson professed to be “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the firm used a voice “so eerily similar to mine.” The firm withdrew the offending voice, denying that any similarities were intentional.
Others have argued that artists’ fears are overblown. In a recent interview, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos argued that AI is simply another “tool,” likening it to technological advances such as CG animation or home video.
“AI is not going to take your job,” Sarandos said. “The person who uses AI well might take your job.”
Filmmaking is one of the most centralized industries in the world, where films languish in development hell or are allocated millions of dollars in funding based on the whims of a small number of executives.
“We have about five to six major studios, three of which are just the giants—the behemoths—and they make all the decisions,” Film.io co-creator Don Richmond told Decrypt. That means that for filmmakers, there’s no clear route for securing funding for projects. “You have to forge the path ane...
Crane acknowledged concerns about AI “taking jobs” and “people being exploited,” but argued that the technology empowers creators outside the traditional system.
“It's the studios, the big power structures that are controlling AI and exploiting the little person,” Crane said. “But when you look at the finalists, and you look at the filmmakers who were represented here, these are the so-called little people, these are the people operating outside of that system.”
AI technology, he said, is giving them the chance to “really compete with multimillion dollar films in a way that's just not been possible before.”
NFTs have provided digital artists with new ways to monetize their work by introducing scarcity to the market, but other creative fields can also benefit, performance art duo Operator told Decrypt.
The performing arts have a “similar issue” to digital artists, explained Ania Catherine, who works with collaborator Dejha Ti as Operator. Prior to the advent of NFTs, Catherine said, “Digital artists were in a position of being in a service industry, working for advertising firms, the film industry,...
Luxury fashion and NFT-linked products company 9dcc will wind down operations at the end of May, citing economic challenges and “softness” in luxury retail sales, and perhaps being too early to a future trend in the making.
The brand, which sold shirts, hats, and other apparel items as “networked products,” physically linked its clothing to NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain via sewn-in NFC chips. This allowed owners to prove provenance and even obtain digital signatures that lived on the blockchai...
Renowned British actor Sir Patrick Stewart has teamed up with the DeLorean Motor Company to launch a car marketplace on the blockchain.
Based on the Sui network, The DeLorean Marketplace is designed to modernize the process of reserving, managing and reselling high-end cars.
A new frontier awaits… Where DeLorean awaits.@deloreanmotorco @DeLoreanlabs pic.twitter.com/xiucv9dzV3
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) May 22, 2025
DeLorean shot to fame back in the 1980s, when the company’s DMC-12 car was...
