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  "path": "/peter-jackson-ai",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-13T21:18:49.000Z",
  "site": "https://nofilmschool.com",
  "tags": [
    "The hunt for gollum",
    "Lord of the rings",
    "Artificial intelligence",
    "Ai",
    "Peter jackson",
    "That fight has been brewing for a while now",
    "the craft of inhabiting a character through a mocap suit",
    "Variety",
    "Demi Moore and Paul Laverty",
    "Deadline"
  ],
  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nDirector Peter Jackson is at Cannes and just received an Honorary Palme d’Or (presented by Elijah Wood). He also gave a masterclass talk, where he weighed in on one of the fest's buzziest topics—artificial intelligence.\n\nHis position isn't the industry panic version. He sees it as a tool, no different from any other special effect.\n\n\"Talking about AI use in film, I don't dislike it,\" he said. “At all. I mean, to me, it’s just a special effect. It’s no different from other special effects.\"\n\n> What he does care about, and strongly, is actors retaining control of their own likenesses.\n\nUse AI on someone who's agreed to it and been compensated fairly? Fine. Swipe someone's face without permission? It's a different conversation entirely. That fight has been brewing for a while now. He likened it to licensing the rights to do a book adaptation or getting permission to use a song in a film.\n\n“If you’re doing an AI duplicate of somebody, like Indiana Jones or anybody else, so long as you’ve licensed the rights off the person who you’re showing, I don’t see the issue,” Jackson said. “It’s when people’s likenesses get stolen and usurped.”\n\nJackson is also pretty thorny about the fact that the ongoing anxiety around AI has seemingly poisoned the well for motion capture performances, and that the craft of inhabiting a character through a mocap suit is now getting lumped in with generative AI in a way that makes awards recognition basically impossible.\n\nSerkis built Gollum as an actor. He was then animated using CGI. Jackson thinks the conflation is unfair.\n\n“A lot of the current environment, everyone’s so worried about AI ... I don’t think a Gollum-type character or a generated character has any hope for winning any awards,” he said (per Variety). “Which is a bit unfair, especially in the Andy Serkis case, where it’s not an AI-generated performance, it’s a human-generated performance 100% of the way.”\n\nEarlier this week, Demi Moore and Paul Laverty also discussed AI, with the former calling it inevitable and the latter more concerned about the politics and power behind the business.\n\n_The Hunt for Gollum_ is currently shooting in New Zealand. Principal photography started this month, with a Dec. 17, 2027, release date set.\n\nSerkis is directing and playing Gollum. Ian McKellen is back as Gandalf. Kate Winslet has been cast in the female lead.\n\nJackson gave his reasoning for stepping back, per Deadline: \"I could have directed it, but I thought, I've done that. It would be more interesting with this particular story—which takes place between _The_ _Hobbit_ and _The_ _Lord of the Rings_ —if Andy Serkis directed it.\"",
  "title": "Is AI Basically Like Special Effects? Peter Jackson Seems to Think So"
}