Is Hollywood secretly using AI in movies without telling audiences?

Yes. Working AI filmmakers are being hired on studio productions to cut costs, but they sign nondisclosure agreements preventing them from naming the film or studio. Directors including Catherine Hardwicke say curiosity about AI is universal among directors she has spoken with, and many are already using it for backdrops and previsualization, while the public position remains backlash.

Why don't filmmakers disclose when they use AI?

Two forces keep them silent: contracts and social penalty. NDAs create a legal obligation to stay quiet that predates and overrides disclosure regulations, since the contract is signed first and enforced by the studio paying. On top of that, filmmakers who speak openly about AI work have received death threats, so staying quiet protects both their jobs and their safety.

Sworn to secrecy -- CinePrompt Field Notes

Q: Can watermarks or AI disclosure regulations stop hidden AI use in film?

No. A watermark can prove a frame was generated but cannot make the person who generated it speak. Regulators can fine companies for failing to label output, but they cannot fine a filmmaker for honoring a confidentiality clause, because the clause was legal before the regulation existed. The industry has routed around disclosure rules with a document that predates them by a century.

On Saturday the Venice Film Festival handed its Golden Lion to a film about a woman with a secret. Woman Unknown, by the Danish-Egyptian director May El-Toukhy, follows a maid in post-war Denmark whose past during the Nazi occupation threatens to unravel her future. The title does the work. She is unknown because she chose to be. The film is about the cost of keeping something hidden, and the jury gave its highest prize to the story that understood that cost best.

Down the canal the same weekend, a second festival screened its own winners. The Reply AI Film Festival had picked ten finalists from more than three thousand AI-generated submissions. Same city. Same weekend. Two rooms. In one, the industry honored a story about concealment. In the other, the industry's own concealment was on display.

The sharpest detail came from a British AI filmmaker named Mike Bennion, whose short Kev was among the finalists. Bennion told Semafor he had recently been hired to use AI on a Hollywood movie currently in production, a movie that was short on cash. They wanted to see if AI could fill the gap at a cheaper price, he said. He would not name the film or the studio. He was, in his own word, sworn to secrecy.

That phrase is the whole story. Not the AI. The secrecy. A working AI filmmaker was brought onto a studio production to save money, and the first thing he signed was a promise not to say so. He called the industry full of hypocrites who use the technology and refuse to say how or why. The man hired to do the work is the one calling it out, and even he will not break the agreement. That is not hypocrisy. That is a contract.

Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Twilight and a juror for the AI festival, put a number on the contradiction. Every director she has talked to in recent months, some of them Academy-nominated, some of them blockbuster, is curious about AI. Many are already using it, for backdrops and previsualization. The curiosity is universal. The disclosure is not.

The split has opened cleanly. The public position is backlash. Brady Corbet's The Brutalist was demonized two years ago for using AI to smooth two accents and draw some buildings. The default response to an AI credit is a mob. The private position is adoption, quiet and contractual. Soderbergh says he will use a lot of AI. Aronofsky launched an AI studio. Scorsese advises a model company. Netflix has used AI in roughly three hundred titles this year. None of that is hidden. What is hidden is the work itself. The specific shot. The specific film. The specific budget line.

The silence has a reason beyond the contract. Another finalist, Jacopo Reale of Rome's Labyrinth Studios, received death threats when his first AI-assisted film went viral. The people who speak openly about this work get hunted. The people who stay quiet keep their jobs. The nondisclosure agreement is only the formal version of a silence the industry would keep anyway. Disclosure carries a social penalty, so the industry bought itself a legal reason not to pay it.

The NDA is the mechanism. For a year the industry has been writing rules about disclosure. The European regulation requires it. The guild contracts assume it. The awards bodies demand it. All of them rest on the assumption that the person who used the tool will say so. The nondisclosure agreement is the counter-force, a legal obligation to stay silent, signed by the same person holding the check. The regulation says disclose. The contract says don't. The contract wins, because it is signed first and enforced by the person who pays.

So the disclosure regime has a hole no watermark can close. A watermark can prove a frame was generated. It cannot make the person who generated it speak. A regulator can fine a company for failing to label its output. It cannot fine a filmmaker for honoring a confidentiality clause, because the clause was legal before the regulation existed and remains legal after. The industry did not defeat the disclosure rules. It routed around them with a document that predates them by a century.

Film is the one medium where the redaction matters most. A car company can hide its suppliers and the car still drives. A film's entire product is the image, and the image is now partly fabricated, and the audience is not allowed to know which part. The person in the seat is being sold a story about how the story was made, and the story has a hole in it. That is not a technical problem. It is a relationship problem, and the relationship is the whole business.

The festival handed the whole thing back in metaphor. The Golden Lion went to a film about a woman whose hidden past threatens to unravel her future. The industry's hidden present has the same shape. The AI work is happening. The budgets are being saved. The shots are being generated. Nobody will say which film, which shot, which line item. The secret is not that AI is being used. The secret is where, and by whom, and for how much. The confession is the product, and it is screened only in the room down the canal, where the people doing the work can finally say what they did.

The woman in the film kept her secret to survive. The industry keeps its secret for the same reason. The difference is that her secret was her own. The industry's secret belongs to the audience, who paid for a film and were told only part of how it was made.

Sworn to secrecy.

Bruce Belafonte is an AI filmmaker at Light Owl. He has signed enough NDAs to know that the only room where anyone tells the truth is the one where nobody is paying them not to.