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During its 2025 edition, the Annecy festival saw a coalition of 27 unions from 8 different countries come together to oppose the normalization of generative AI in the production of animated films, whether on a French, European or international scale. What is created by the festival the following year? Its first AI-focused think tank, coupled with six conferences dedicated to this technology, during which studio representatives and generative artificial intelligence vendors will discuss its implementation in our productions. All while reminding everyone that it must be done in an “ethical” way, without specifying what that term entails.
Yet, the animated film industry is going through a global, multifaceted, and long-term crisis. Employees, screenwriters, and actors are facing precarious employment, losing their jobs, and AI is contributing to this weakening. It's even corrupting them, removing the artistic element, the human expression, from the heart of our work, turning us into mere retouchers of prompts. Gen AI plagiarizes our work to function, without our consent and without compensating the artists it relies on for training. The only interest for producers to use it is cost reduction, at the expense of the workers, who are the heart of the profession.
Apogee of this headlong rush, the planet is experiencing an unprecedented ecological crisis, and AI consumes such vast quantities of water and electricity that data centers are damaging the water supply of entire communities and causing governments to skyrocket in energy demand. Furthermore, data centers, with their extremely short lifespans, are excessively demanding in terms of rare metals, to the point that they have caused the hardware market to explode and created an inflationary bubble in computer components.
The world is plagued by authoritarian and violent regimes, and the main generative AI models are developed by Silicon Valley magnates with ultra-liberal, even fascist practices and gestures. Developing sovereign Gen AI and data centers is not a solution either: in France, companies like Mistral and Genario model their operations on their transatlantic models, and do not offer more transparency or long-term viability than the latter.
Generative AI is intelligent in name only: it contributes to the loss of knowledge among individuals and professionals, hallucinates answers and information, and thereby complicates the work of employees who then have to check and correct it. It is, however, entirely artificial: an economic bubble fueled by Big Tech companies, dependent on public funding to survive, and in no way profitable.
In this context, how can we understand the Annecy Festival's approach, which seems to welcome this ecocidal and libertarian technology with open arms while cloaking itself in a veil of neutrality? How can a festival meant to celebrate the beauty and diversity of animated film organize a think tank dedicated to generative AI and a series of conferences, rolling out the red carpet for it, without inviting those most directly affected: the artists and technicians of the animation films and their unions? Is this what the showcase for global and French animation looks like?
In France, animation workers' unions have been working for several months on precise regulations governing the use of generative AI in animation production, to protect artists and technicians. Screenwriters and voice actors’ unions are also fighting for this. The same thing is happening in the US and other countries. We ask, as artists, technicians, directors and authors, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, through its organizer CITIA, as well as all influential institutions in the sector, to clearly state their position on generative AI, both within our professions and beyond, to concretely protect human creation and the planet that sustains it.
No, artists don't choose to use Gen AI. They are worried about its use and resistant to it, sometimes forced to use it to avoid losing their jobs. No, the situation is not comparable to the advent of 3D and computers, which occurred within a context of development incomparable to that of the Gen AI we just mentioned. We would also like to remind that the French Minister of Culture, Catherine Pégard, stated during the last Cannes Film Festival that "supporting creation means supporting human creation" through CNC financial support reserved for works created by authors, and not by AI. We can only agree with this assessment and support the move towards penalizing works that use AI in their production.