A striking admission surfaced at a Venice sidebar this month. Mike Bennion, an AI filmmaker, told Semafor he had been asked to use AI on a Hollywood film that was short on cash - and was "sworn to secrecy." His blunt read on the business: it is full of people who use the technology but will not say how, or why.
The gap between posture and practice
The public conversation about AI in film is loud and principled - guilds, open letters, festival panels. The private one is quieter and more transactional: a production runs short on budget, and AI becomes the cheapest way to fill a gap. That distance between what studios say and what productions quietly do is arguably the real story of 2026, more than any single tool or launch.
Why the secrecy is the tell
When a practice has to be hidden, it usually means the economics and the optics point in opposite directions. The economics pull toward AI wherever it is cheaper; the reputational risk pulls toward silence. For anyone working in production, the useful signal is not the press-release posture but where money is quietly being saved - because that is where the workflow is actually changing.
It is also worth keeping separate two things the secrecy tends to blur. Some uses are genuinely uncontroversial - aged textures, background fill, reference. Others - replacing performers or crew - are not. Treating them as one thing helps no one, and honest disclosure would make the line easier to hold.
Source: Semafor.