A new film festival will only show movies made using AI

AI tools are increasingly being used to create movies, music, and images. A new film festival plans to put such works front and center.

Runway ML, the artificial intelligence startup that was instrumental in creating the text-to-image tool Stable Diffusion, began taking submissions today for an AI Film Festival slated for February that will only showcase movies created with the help of AI. The company’s founders have been thinking about the idea for years, and with AI-generated content becoming increasingly prevalent, it feels like the time to turn that vision into a reality, says Runway cofounder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela.

“I think we’re heading to a future where a lot of the content and the entertainment and the media that you see online will be generated,” he says.

While AI-generated content has proven somewhat controversial amid fears that it will replace human workers, Valenzuela says he’s excited to see what filmmakers, potentially including some newly empowered by easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools, come up with for the festival.

“What I’m really excited about is how AI is really opening the doors for nontechnical people and creatives at large,” he says.

To qualify for the festival, movies need to be between one and 10 minutes in length and “feature AI-generated content and/or AI-powered editing techniques.” While the company naturally says using Runway’s suite of tools, which include so-called “AI magic tools” that can create a realistic-looking video transitioning between uploaded still images or erase and replace objects in photos and videos, videos created with other AI software won’t be held at a disadvantage. Valenzuela says he’s excited to see submissions of all kinds, from music videos to narrative films, hopefully including some incorporating AI techniques in ways the Runway team hasn’t previously considered.

“I’m really excited to see how musicians are incorporating this in their video, and how long-form and short-form can be created with these tools,” he says.

Festival judges plan to evaluate each submission based on quality of composition, cohesion of narrative, originality, as well as the AI techniques used. Top films will be awarded cash prizes, including a $10,000 grand prize, and many of the films will be screened in New York in February and online.

Runway separately announced Monday that it raised $50 million in a Series C round, which the company says will help it continue to make multimedia creation more accessible through the power of AI tools, which Valenzuela anticipates will ultimately become as mainstream as traditional editing software is today.

“At some point, you will just become very familiar and useful to them in the same way that you’re used to Photoshop, you’re used to Premiere, you’re used to any other tools,” he says.

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