Cannes filmmakers confront AI's extractive logic amid systemic precarity: a shift from inevitability to contested futures
Original framing: “At Cannes, filmmakers shift towards cautious acceptance of AI's inevitability - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The shift mirrors earlier industrial revolutions that commodified art, from the printing press to mechanical reproduction, but now accelerated by digital capitalism. The 20th-century studio system's precarity for artists parallels today's gig economy, where AI is touted as 'liberation' while deepening dependency. Historical precedents like the Luddites reveal how 'inevitability' narratives mask class power—today, venture capital plays the role of the factory owners.
The Cannes narrative reflects a broader tech-industrial strategy to naturalize AI as an unstoppable force, obscuring how venture capital and corporate sponsors (e.g.
, LVMH, Netflix) manufacture this 'inevitability' to extract value from creative labor and cultural data. This framing erases historical parallels—from the Luddites to the enclosure acts—where 'progress' was weaponized to dispossess workers, while ignoring non-Western epistemologies (e.g., Māori *kaitiakitanga*, African trickster traditions) that reject AI's extractive logic. The solution lies not in resignation but in reclaiming agency: cooperative AI models, Indigenous data sovereignty, and labor unions could transform AI from a tool of precarity into one of collective empowerment. Yet this requires dismantling the power structures that frame AI as inevitable—namely, the tech oligarchs and their allies in media who profit from disruption without accountability. The future of cinema, like the future of labor, will be shaped by who controls the tools, the data, and the narratives of 'progress'.