This September, at the Venice Film Festival, critics and industry insiders got a glimpse into a future where artificial intelligence has crept into every aspect of filmmaking. The film Be Brave, a biographical documentary about Diesel fashion brand founder Renzo Rosso, became one of the first AI-generated films to premiere at a major festival.
Not only does the programming of Be Brave threaten artists everywhere, but it also provides a worrying foothold for artificial intelligence as tech moguls are trying to force the technology into every corner of our lives.
Be Brave Is One Of The First AI Films to Play at a Major Festival
“Directed” by Francesco Carrozzini and produced by Italian cinema giants Mario Gianani, Gabriele Immirzi, and Lorenzo Mieli, the film premiered on September 10 and features real, filmed interviews with fashion icons like John Galliano and Anna Wintour alongside recreations of both Rosso’s early life and present-day Rosso, realized using AI. (I have not seen the film, nor will I ever see it. Film critics should boycott watching and reviewing films made with generative AI.)
The production of Be Brave a testament to the sheer laziness of people who use AI to make art. Why would the filmmakers use AI to generate clips of the modern Renzo Rosso, a person who is still alive and could simply sit for an interview? Rosso himself tried to downplay concerns about using AI to make art. According to Reuters, he said he has historically been at the forefront of technological innovation, having been an early adopter of the fax machine. Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that fax machines were not writing books for people, generating and spreading misinformation online en masse, sucking up our clean drinking water, or hacking companies. Nor were fax machines predicted to maybe kill all humans in the next 10 years.
Yet Another Misstep for Venice
Venice’s programming of the film is a gigantic misstep that sets a dangerous precedent. Tech CEOs promised that AI would take over menial tasks like admin and leave us all more time to produce and enjoy art, but it’s exactly the opposite — AI is stealing artistic jobs from us, one by one, while also devaluing and plagiarizing the art that real people produce. Venice’s embrace of films made with generative AI tells filmmakers that their work exists on the same level as lazy garbage made by robots.
But is this direction surprising for Venice? The film festival has long prided itself on standing on the cutting edge of innovation in film, as evidenced by its past embrace of virtual reality and streaming. VR films were introduced to the festival in a dedicated section in 2017, and the next year, Venice gave the top prize, the Golden Lion, to Roma, the first film from a streamer to win a major film festival award. But generative AI is not the same as virtual reality or streaming — it’s not a unique new method of film exhibition but a lazy workaround that steals from artists and creates bland, uninteresting slop while poisoning our world and robbing us of natural resources. Treating it the same as AI or streaming implies that like streaming, AI filmmaking is simply the future, which is far from reality.
Why Does It Matter That Venice Embraced AI?
Despite positioning itself as the most technologically progressive of the five major film festivals, Venice has also tried to skirt controversy by pretending that its programming choices are not political. Its parent body, the Venice Biennale, is run by the rightwing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, and included Russia in its 2026 lineup. Programming art in film festivals is a form of soft power, whereby perceived cultural importance helps advance state goals and political influence. It’s relevant to note that the Venice Film Festival was originally founded under Benito Mussolini’s fascist government in 1932 and gave multiple major awards to Nazi propaganda pictures and filmmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl.
Today, the festival’s embrace of AI — including in its opening night film, Danny Boyle’s Ink, which also uses generative AI for some sequences — is itself an expression of soft power. The goals of AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are to fully ingratiate themselves in every aspect of our lives so that the articles we read, the books we buy, and the films we watch are all produced by or with the help of artificial intelligence. Venice’s wholehearted embrace of the technology gives the AI industry an important foothold in entertainment.
In 2026, the Venice Film Festival also welcomed the Silicon Valley company Sonilo, which uses AI to produce sound effects and music. Sonilo CEO Shawn Song also spoke at an industry forum event at the festival. At the same time, the Reply AI Film Festival 2026 premiered in Venice, screening around 60 short films made with AI, though the event is not related to the Biennale.
What Can We Do?
We need to push back against generative AI. Do we really want to live in a world where AI writes our articles and makes our films for us? Where movies are made with no creative choices whatsoever, only prompts fed into AI models?
Filmmakers and other artists can boycott the Biennale until the organization issues a statement against the use of generative AI and bans the technology in the films it screens. Journalists can interrogate festival director Alberto Barbera about his embrace of the technology and hold him accountable — we need to make it clear that we don’t want to see AI films at film festivals.
Luckily, some have already begun pushing back on Venice’s adoption of AI. George Clooney spoke out against AI at the festival, telling reporters that AI spreads misinformation and that modern media is concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals, some of them tech moguls who have entered the AI space, like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates.
The Telluride Film Festival, meanwhile, took a firm stance against AI. Festival director Julie Huntsinger called AI a “threat,” according to Forbes, and told her audience, “We all need to be very alert and vigilant and loving and kind and stop this shit.” Telluride also programmed a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a murderous AI, HAL 9000, goes rogue and kills most of the crew aboard a spaceship.
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