The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has adjusted the eligibility criteria for films vying for Oscars from 2027 onward.

Films featuring actors generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are now ineligible, as are scripts that aren’t demonstrably human-authored.

Crucially, the rules do not ban AI – generative or otherwise – altogether. The Academy explicitly acknowledged the widespread adoption of generative AI, and has left it to voters to determine whether a film’s creative direction is substantively driven by humans.

Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor framed it simply: “humans have to be at the centre of the creative process”.

The rules were imposed following specific controversies: the 2025 awards season surfaced AI voice modification in The Brutalist, AI voice cloning in Emilia Pérez, and varying degrees of AI use in A Complete Unknown and Dune: Part Two.

The resulting public debate has focused almost entirely on what audiences can see: generated faces, synthetic voices and digital resurrections. But this focus ignores the main areas of film production in which AI actually plays a key role.

Cinema’s automation history

Automation tools have been embedded in cinema for longer than most people realise.

When non-linear editing software Avid Media Composer launched in 1989, it replaced the physical cut-and-splice flatbed........

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