EXCLUSIVE: Justine Bateman has been warning concerning the corrosive realities of generative AI for the artistic group lengthy earlier than most individuals began paying any consideration to the rise of the machines. Now the Violet director is placing her SOS on the massive display with a no AI-allowed movie competition.
Set to debut in LA in 2025, the CREDO 23 Movie Competition guarantees to “a filmmaker-first, no-AI occasion” that’s “actual, and uncooked.”
“With studios, streamers, and now movie festivals, embracing generative AI, it was time for the CREDO 23 Movie Competition,” Bateman instructed Deadline at present of the inspiration and timeliness of the brand new fest. “It creates a tunnel for human artists by the theft-based, job-replacing AI destruction. The competition honors the unbelievable human artists who make movies, and can financially grant recourses to human filmmakers to proceed to take action.”
These grants will come. from the income from C23FF, all of them. “We assist creativity, not conformity,” the organizer say, including that AI is “based mostly on stolen work, it solely regurgitates the previous.”
Working from March 28- 30, 2025 on the American Legion, Submit 43, in Hollywood, the C23FF will likely be accepting submissions from August 1 to Halloween, October 31, 2024. You’ll be able to submit your AI-free movie right here. Badges for movie followers will go on sale on November 1.
Self-defined as “a group of movie and sequence professionals that maintain filmmaking sacred, and perceive their accountability to protect the artwork type,” the CREDO 23 Council contains Bateman, Juliette Lewis, Mad Males boss Matt Weiner, Handmaid’s Story helmer Reed Morano and As soon as Upon a Time In Hollywood costume designer Arianne Phillips.
On the core of final 12 months’s Sizzling Labor Summer season AI was additionally an enormous a part of the now concluded IATSE bargaining and the continuing Teamsters negotiations this 12 months. Within the final 18 months the leaps and bounds within the content material scrolling know-how has seen AI introduced totally into the studio and streamer mainstream as corporations search to chop prices and reduce corners.
Cuts that Bateman raised the alarm over continuously in SAG-AFTRA’s combat with the studios and streamers and the deal they finally reached.
“I’ve maintained from the very starting, once I began speaking to actors about what would occur, that’s the important thing to the entrance door,” Bateman instructed Deadline’s Katie Campione final November because the SAG-AFTRA contract and its AI provisions awaited ratification (Spoiler Alert: it handed).
“You are able to do all these renovations in the home,” Bateman added persevering with the true property analogy. “You may get all these different good points within the contract. However in case you don’t get that, in case you don’t get management of what they’ll do with out you based mostly on 100 years of performances…you place in a immediate and also you get out this Frankenstein amalgamation of performances. I stated that in case you don’t get that, you’ve given them the entrance key to the home, as a result of it’s not simply the actors. It’s the crew, it’s the drivers, it’s everyone. In case you don’t must shoot an actor, you don’t want a set. You don’t want a crew. You don’t want drivers.”
Because the backlash in opposition to AI has grown on this 12 months of trade contraction, final month former SAG board member Bateman’s group launched its CREDO 23 VFX stamp to filmmakers may present viewers that their work has no AI, minimal CGI and VFX and is union made.
Bateman teased the brand new competition final week on X/Twitter:
