Hollywood may be worried about AI, but the Tribeca Festival is ready to embrace the future

nypost.com:

annual Tribeca Festival, which opened Wednesday night and runs through June 16, will look a little different this year.For the first time, Tribeca will give awards to short films generated by artificial intelligence.

It’s one of the entertainment industry’s first public embraces of the new technology, which many actors and writers fear will render them obsolete.

The use of AI was a major sticking point in last summer’s Writer’s Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes. “People are concerned about jobs and that’s something obviously we’re all concerned about,” Rosenthal told The Post. “But I think it will also be about creating new jobs… if you’re a VFX [visual effects] editor, you’re still going to be a VFX editor … you’ll just have new tools to play with.”It’s the latest move by the 23-year-old festival to keep up with the changing media landscape.

While good old-fashioned movies and documentaries are still the stars, the festival dropped the word “film” from its name in 2022 and rebranded itself as simply Tribeca Festival. “We want to bring all the artists and all different kind of storytellers under our big roof,” Rosenthal said.In recent years, Tribeca has also added awards for less conventional mediums such as video games, music videos and audio storytelling.“Artists are pivoting… they’re doing pieces in VR, in art, they’re doing gaming,” Rosenthal said. “It’s a much more fluid way to kind of look at how artists approach the world and the stories they want to tell.”The moves come despite the fact that both Rosenthal and De Niro are veterans of conventional filmmaking.