People upstairs are scolding AI, while people downstairs are selling AI.

The most classic moment at the 79th Cannes International Film Festival this year was a swear word in the Debussy Hall of the Palais des Festivals.

That night, right after the screening of the 20th - anniversary 4K restored version of Pan's Labyrinth, the lights came on. Renowned director Guillermo del Toro stepped onto the stage and directly shouted into the microphone:

Fuck AI.

There was a second of silence at the scene. Then, applause and laughter erupted.

Thierry Frémaux, the artistic director of Cannes, who was standing nearby, immediately elevated this statement to an official stance:

This is the first political declaration of Cannes this year.

At that moment, the entire hall seemed to have found a common enemy. Directors, actors, screenwriters, and film critics all stood on the same side. It was as if the last line of defense for human cinema was erected in this small town by the French seaside.

However, this sense of sacredness didn't even last for one night.

As people walked out of the venue and looked up, they saw that one of the biggest official partners of Cannes this year was Meta. Its huge logo was hanging by the beach, like a silent declaration of colonization. AI glasses were directly introduced onto the red - carpet. When the glamorous world was using AI to perceive the world, the resistance of filmmakers seemed like a magnificent self - mockery.

Taking a few more steps forward, Kelin AI, under the Chinese company Kuaishou, was demonstrating to global producers on the main stage of the film market how to use AI to produce feature - length films at the theatrical level.

People upstairs are cursing AI, while people downstairs are selling AI.

This is probably the most realistic microcosm of the entire world in 2026.

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This year's Cannes indeed has an almost absurd sense of fragmentation.

On one hand, filmmakers are desperately defending the dignity of organic cinema. On the other hand, technology companies are starting to fully take over the infrastructure of the film industry.

Meta not only sponsored the film festival but also directly embedded real - time translation systems, AI glasses, and social communication tools into the core event scenarios. Kelin was even more blatant, displaying AI - generated animated shorts, ongoing AI feature - length films, and AI - based film and television distribution plans for the global market in the exhibition hall.

Many traditional directors are still arguing about whether AI can be considered art. Meanwhile, people downstairs are calculating another set of numbers: How much money can be saved on an explosion shot? How much can the production cycle of a film be shortened? How much more can the copyright of an overseas version be sold for?

Frémaux was very firm in his statement at a press conference: AI - generated content is absolutely banned from the main competition.

He said that Cannes will always stand on the side of screenwriters, actors, and voice - over artists. To prove the value of human cinema, he cited the old story of Francis Ford Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now. Back then, those dozens of helicopters were actually deployed to the filming location at a huge cost. But today, a director only needs to type: Add fifteen helicopters to the frame.

In Frémaux's view, this is cheating.

However, Peter Jackson, the director of the The Lord of the Rings series, openly mocked at a master class, saying that the industry's panic about AI is blind. AI is just a special - effects tool, no different in essence from other visual technologies. Actress Demi Moore also publicly disagreed: AI is here, and learning to coexist with it is more useful than being afraid.

Cannes' approach is actually very smart: banning AI upstairs while embracing it downstairs. The main competition upholds the artistic bottom line, while the film market continues to do business.

However, the gap between these two "floors" is rapidly narrowing.

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Why do filmmakers react so strongly to AI?

Essentially, it's because AI has truly touched creativity for the first time.

In the past few decades, AI has mostly replaced repetitive labor, process - based work, and information processing. But today, it is starting to enter fields such as film, music, painting, writing, voice - over, and acting. The most core territory of human beings for a long time has been touched for the first time.

So del Toro's "Fuck AI" is not really a technical critique but more like a kind of civilizational anxiety.

For a long time, humans have taken it for granted that art must come from real life experiences. You have to have truly experienced a breakup, suffered, and lived to write a song, a film, or a story.

But today, AI doesn't need life experiences or emotions. It only needs data, computing power, models, and reasoning, and then it can generate things that look like art.

What traditional directors are really afraid of may not be that AI makes bad films. On the contrary, it's that AI is starting to make films more and more like humans.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Film Festival (WAIFF) near Cannes, a 22 - year - old young director revealed on - site that an AI - generated visual scene of Alzheimer's disease in his film only cost 500 euros. Traditional special effects would cost at least 20,000 euros.

The gap between 500 euros and 20,000 euros represents the speed at which the question of who can make films is being rewritten.

In the past, making films was a privilege of a few people. Today, it is starting to become an ability that can be replicated on a large scale.

What makes this even more interesting is the coincidence in time.

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While Cannes was still arguing about whether AI can be considered cinema in the same week, on the other side of the Pacific, people were discussing another thing: When will AI replace humans in the workplace?

On May 19, Google I/O 2026 opened. Sundar Pichai, the CEO and Chairman of Google, started with a statement: We have entered the Gemini Agent era.

In the past, large - scale models basically answered one question at a time. But Agents are different. They start to act on their own.

Google released Gemini Spark, an AI intelligent agent that runs autonomously 24/7 in the background. Even when you turn off your computer, it keeps working. It can go through your bills, follow up on your emails, organize your schedule, call third - party tools, and automatically complete complex task chains.

While you are sleeping, it is still processing data, generating plans, and calling APIs.

For the first time, humans are facing a digital workforce that never gets tired.

Some figures are quite shocking. Gemini has a monthly active user base of 900 million. Google's monthly token processing has increased from 97 trillion two years ago to 3200 trillion, a 330 - fold increase. When the computing power reaches this scale, AI is no longer just a tool but is gradually becoming another form of tireless civilized species.

Google's AI infrastructure expenditure in 2026 is expected to be between 180 billion and 190 billion US dollars. If movie box - office revenue is the premium of human emotions, then these 180 billion dollars are the most brutal bet by the global tech community on the devaluation of creativity. It has increased by 6 times in four years.

On the same day in Shanghai, AMD held its global AI developers' conference outside North America for the first time, choosing China as the venue. The original plan was for a thousand - person event, but more than 4000 people signed up, and over 2000 showed up. Lisa Su, the CEO, was immediately surrounded as soon as she entered the exhibition area.

She said that AI is redefining every layer of computing and predicted that the number of active global AI users will exceed 5 billion in the next five years.

The next day in Hangzhou, Alibaba Cloud announced the completion of a full - stack Agent - based upgrade of "chip - cloud - model - inference". It is the first time in China that a cloud service provider has made a full - stack release centered around Agents.

Liu Weiguang, a senior vice - president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, had a statement worth highlighting: The users of the cloud are changing from humans to Agents.

This means that in the future, more and more traffic, tasks, and requests may no longer come from real people but from AI.

In the same week, on one side, people were arguing about whether AI deserves to enter the film hall. On the other side, the discussion was already about whether AI can completely take over the human workflow.

This is not on the same scale at all.

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What AI companies are really doing is never just about movies.

Why does Meta sponsor Cannes?

It's not because it loves art films. Instagram, Threads, AI glasses, real - time translation, and AI - generated videos are all coming together to form a unified content world. Movies are just a small part of it.

Why did Google release the world model Gemini Omni at the I/O conference, enabling any input to be converted into any output, understanding physical laws, and allowing for conversational video editing?

Why does Alibaba shout about the "Agentic era" and announce that the users of the cloud are changing from humans to Agents?

Why did AMD hold its global conference in China for the first time? They are aiming at the next - generation content production infrastructure and taking over the world's generative ability.

In the past, the Internet was connecting the world. Now, AI is starting to directly generate the world.

What's even more disturbing is not just that AI can generate movies, but that AI is starting to generate human understanding of reality.

In the past, we believed that seeing was believing. But when AI - generated videos, voices, characters, and news appear on a large scale, humans have entered an era where "seeing is not necessarily believing".

Every time there is a technological revolution in the history of cinema, people say that cinema is dying. It "died" when sound films came, when special effects came, when digital photography came, and when Netflix came.

Looking back, it has never really died.

But in the past, every change only affected how movies were made. The tools changed, but the people making the movies remained the same.

This time is different. When 500 euros can achieve the effect that used to cost 20,000 euros, the answer to the question "Who can make movies" has been permanently rewritten.

This is a redistribution of the right to create.

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In the past, movies recorded reality. Later, movies started to create illusions. Now, AI is starting to directly generate reality.

When AI generates images, sounds, expressions, narratives, and emotions on a large scale, humans will eventually find that it is getting harder and harder to distinguish between what has been truly experienced and what has been generated.

This may be what really makes this conflict disturbing.

So the most interesting moment at Cannes this year was not the "Fuck AI".

Actually, it was:

People upstairs are still desperately defending the old world.

People downstairs are already selling tickets to the new world.

Some figures can perhaps measure the distance between these two worlds. Google's AI infrastructure expenditure in 2026 is expected to be 180 billion US dollars. The total global box - office revenue of the film industry in 2025 was about 30 billion US dollars. The money AI spends on infrastructure in one year is more than 5 times the global movie box - office revenue.

Old - style creation relies on human craftsmanship, experience, emotions, and intuition. New - style creation depends on the scale, speed, tirelessness, and infinite replicability of machines.

In the week of May 2026, these two forms of creation both made their voices heard.

The result of this collision will not be determined by the one who shouts the loudest.

[Beyond the Page] Words:

Cannes has separated resistance and compromise on different floors. This split may seem a bit hypocritical. But on second thought, this is clearly an accelerated version of the theory of evolution.

People know in their hearts that the old world is gone, but they still want to hold on a little longer before the new world truly arrives.

In the Debussy Hall, an Oscar - winning veteran director cursed at AI. The whole audience erupted in thunderous applause.

That applause sounded more like a tribute and even more like a dirge.

Meanwhile, in data centers thousands of kilometers away, thousands of GPUs are silently and ceaselessly breaking down the last human wall of reality.

They have no emotions. They don't get angry. And they never stop.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Beyond the Page", written by Huahua. It is published by 36Kr with permission.