Hollywood is secretly using AI, but terrified to admit it

Behind closed doors in Hollywood, a quiet consensus has emerged: almost everyone is using generative AI, but hardly anyone will dare put it on a poster.

Back in March, the indie horror hit Late Night With the Devil sparked furious calls for a boycott over just three AI-generated cutaway graphics, including a dancing skeleton. Weeks later, A24 faced swift fan outrage when promotional posters for Civil War showed glaring AI artifacts, like Chicago’s Marina Towers ending up on opposite sides of the river and a wrecked car with three doors.

Yet the production floor tells a completely different story from the PR feeds. David Stripinis, a veteran VFX supervisor whose credits include Avatar and Man of Steel, laid it bare: tons of people across writers' rooms and post-production houses are tapping into AI daily, but they keep quiet because alienating human artists is a public relations nightmare.

Shadows on the lot and the first jobs on the block

David Defendi, screenwriter and founder of the AI tool Genario, noted that using these systems gives productions a sharp edge, and anyone ignoring them is falling behind. But the backlash is fueled by what those early adoptions signify. Producing a few still images for Late Night cost next to nothing, meaning studios were eager to replace human workers even on trivial background tasks.

European screenwriters union head David Kavanagh pointed out that while AI remains a terrible scriptwriter, other corners of the business are facing extinction. In his words, dubbing and subtitling employment across Europe is basically finished.

At the Cannes Film Festival, XYZ Films and Flawless showcased TrueSync, an AI lip-sync dubbing tech that translates foreign releases into English, eyeing the first full theatrical AI rollout with the Swedish film UFO Sweden. Meanwhile, Polish director Besaleel brought his biopic Putin to Cannes, openly using AI face-replacement on his lead and declaring that future sets will likely keep only main stars while digital tools generate every extra and background performer.

That grim forecast aligns with hard data. A January survey of 300 entertainment industry leaders revealed that three out of four respondents saw AI driving layoffs, staff reductions, or role consolidations. An estimated 204,000 entertainment jobs are expected to be hit over the next three years, with concept artists, sound engineers, and voice actors sitting directly in the blast radius.

The de-aging double standard and the open source defense

Oddly, the public does not hate all AI equally. Fans revolted against indie poster art, yet Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming film Here, which uses Metaphysics Live to de-age Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in real time, drew far less fire. But that high-end use case carries its own threat: if A-listers can seamlessly play their twenty-year-old selves, younger talent gets shut out from breakout roles entirely.

Faced with copyright gray areas and looming labor disputes, some VFX supervisors are finding practical workarounds. Jim Geduldick, a supervisor on Masters of the Air, explained that rather than feeding commercial black-box models, teams are adopting open source systems trained strictly on their own datasets. If you train the model on internal work, you legally own the output and bypass studio liability.

Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin attempted to strike an optimistic chord at Cannes, claiming AI will ultimately unlock creativity and create jobs rather than destroy them, comparing the tech to tools Muppets creator Jim Henson would have embraced.

Why it matters

Hollywood’s current AI posture is a study in corporate hypocrisy. Studios are quietly relying on algorithms to compress budgets while dodging the blowback by keeping credits vague. For freelance creatives, concept artists, and voice actors, the writing is on the wall: entry-level and peripheral gigs are being automated first, removing the very stepping stones newcomers need to build sustainable careers.

For the broader industry, this is not a replay of the 1990s CGI boom, which fostered entirely new creative departments. Generative AI is functioning primarily as a headcount cutter and a gatekeeper. By handing stars the power to play any age, it consolidates casting power among legacy actors while slashing production payrolls down to the bone.

We think the real danger for studios lies in treating this as merely a public relations hurdle rather than a labor crisis. Hiding AI under the rug while quietly slashing junior payroll will eventually hollow out the artistic talent pipeline. Those adapting best right now appear to be artists taking control of open source tooling on their own terms, rather than waiting for studios to figure out the ethics.