Does the Oscars' AI ban really mean anything?

There's some good news for everyone who's tired of AI slop: Tilly Norwood won't be winning an Oscar any time soon. The Academy Awards has banned generative AI eligibility for certain categories, but how much impact with the move really have?

As announced on Friday, several rules have been changed ahead of next year's 99th Oscars awards. That includes a decision to allow a single actor to receive multiple nominations in the same category and for a single country to have more than one nomination for Best International Feature Film.

The rule that's sparked the biggest debate is a new ban on AI. But crucially, the move isn't as sweeping as it sounds.

An update to the Oscars' Special Rules for Acting Awards states that "only roles credited in the film's legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent will be considered eligible." Meanwhile, the Special Rules for Writing Awards now state that "an explicit screenwriting credit must be present in the film’s legal billing and the screenplay must be human-authored."

In effect, the 'AI ban' only applies to entirely AI-generated content in the acting and screenplay categories. That's a long way from being a complete ban on generative AI, which will still be permitted in VFX, for example. It also seems that generative AI would not make a ineligible for categories like Best Song or Best Animated Feature – both of which went to KPop Demon Hunters this year.

Page 4 of the rulebook also clarifies that some uses of AI will be acceptable in "digital tools used in the making of the film," and that these will "neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination".

It goes on to state that the Academy will "take into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship," reserving the right to request more information about the nature of the use of Generative AI and human authorship.

Since the Oscars are not banning AI from CGI my team will continue to work us AI for our effects from r/aivideo

Unsurprisingly, the apparent fudge has left a lot of people unsatisfied. Some artists have welcomed the gesture, but others see it as a "half measure". People are also surprised that it's taken the Academy so long to take an official position, which suggests it may have actually been considering broader eligibility for generative AI.

Some note on that the categories affected are those where AI was least likely to win. "[It] doesn't remove AI... [it] only removes purely generated [movies] that were never really gonna win in the first place," one person writes on X. "If a movie is authored by a human and as long as the actors are human, they're basically saying AI can take all the background roles sans scripting and still win."

"Most likely they are aware of what the techbros are saying to executives and are preemptively blocking them by removing the prestige factor," someone else suggests. "You can't advertise the effectiveness of an AI actor if it can't compete for awards against real people”.

It remains to be seen how the ban on AI screenwriting will be audited. If a human writer uses AI to help with the process or refines a script originally generated by AI, how will that be detected?

"It's just performative signalling that doesn't really do much. You can't definitively tell if AI was used, so the rule can never realistically be enforced,” one person thinks.

On the other side, AI enthusiasts claim the Oscars will lose all relevance through what they see as an "anti-innovation" stance. One person writing on X even describes the ban as "institutionalized bio-elitism" – "you're banning the tool to protect the ego," they argue.

In the end, the Academy's somewhat flexible approach might be sensible. The potential uses of Generative AI in filmmaking are so broad that banning it completely would be limiting and impractical. Respeecher's AI technology was used to refine Adrien Brody's Hungarian accent and pronunciation in The Brutalist, for which he won Best Actor in 2025.

AI is already widely used for effects in movies, including to de-age actors such as Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford in Here and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny respectively. It's also used for processes like outpainting, upscaling, creating background imagery and optimising visual effects. There's a wider issue to address around how tools should be credited as AI becomes embedded in production pipelines.

The real test perhaps isn't so much whether AI can win an Oscar but whether audiences are prepared to watch a movie where the use of generative AI is obvious enough to be distracting.