AI Film Festival Makes Creators Reveal Exactly How They Used AI
AI filmmakers entering the We Are Human Festival must reveal which tools they used and explain exactly where humans remained involved.
An international film festival is doing something unusual with AI movies. Instead of simply showing the finished films, it wants audiences to know exactly how artificial intelligence helped make them.
Every creator entering the We Are Human Festival must submit an Ethics Notebook revealing which AI tools they used, what humans actually did and what ethical questions came up during production.
That could mean explaining how tools such as Sora, Runway, Midjourney, ElevenLabs or Suno were involved, whether AI generated video, voices, music or text, and how much control remained with the filmmaker.
The result could give audiences a rare look behind the scenes of an AI film rather than leaving them guessing about what was human and what was generated.
There has to be a human behind the film
There is one particularly interesting rule. AI must be involved in an eligible production, but a completely autonomous AI film without identifiable human artistic direction cannot enter.
That means the festival isn’t looking for someone to press a button and let a model produce everything. It wants filmmakers using the technology as part of a creative process.
The Ethics Notebook also asks creators about issues including authorship, bias, representation and where the data behind their tools may have originated.
Those notebooks won’t simply be read privately by judges. The festival plans to present them alongside films and use them as part of discussions about how the work was created.
20 AI films are going global
The competition is open to filmmakers around the world, with entries remaining open until September 30. Fiction, documentaries, animation, experimental films, music videos and video art can all enter, provided films run between one and 10 minutes.
Twenty films will be selected before the main event at the Forum des Images in Paris on November 24.
The films will then travel internationally, with screenings planned in New York, São Paulo, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Quito and Geneva between December 2026 and March 2027.
There is also €10,000 in prize money, including €5,000 for the Grand Prix.
We Are Human ultimately plans 30 editions based around the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its first edition focuses on freedom, equality and dignity.
For audiences increasingly wondering whether the entertainment they’re watching was made by a person or a machine, this festival is trying something refreshingly simple: show us how you made it.
