1,000+ Film Industry Professionals Call for Mandatory 'Visual Drift' Guardrails as AI-Generated Film Screens at Cannes

"Protect The Film Industry From AI" gathers 1,000+ signatures proposing mandatory technical guardrails no current legislation covers

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, May 22, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Higgsfield AI has screened a 95-minute feature film at the 79th Cannes Film Festival that was generated entirely by AI. 15 people. 14 days. Under $500,000. No actors on set. No cinematographers behind cameras. No gaffers, no set builders, no costume designers, no sound recordists. The film is called Hell Grind, and its existence exposes a gap in every piece of AI legislation currently on the table.

A petition called "Protect The Film Industry From AI" has gathered over 1,000 signatures from industry professionals worldwide in response to this gap, proposing a framework called "visual drift" that no existing legislation or industry initiative addresses. It targets the AI generation companies directly, not studios, streaming platforms, or filmmakers.

Higgsfield's CEO, Alex Mashrabov, described Hell Grind as "a signal to the entire industry" and compared its budget to the $50 million a traditionally produced equivalent would require. The film's director, Aitore Zholdaskali, said Higgsfield is doing for filmmakers what the laptop did for musicians.
But that comparison omits something critical. When the laptop democratised music, it put tools in the hands of musicians. When AI generates a feature film end-to-end, it removes the filmmakers from the equation entirely. Hell Grind was made by 15 people operating a platform. The vast majority of the workforce that would normally bring a film to life simply was not needed.

And here is the legislation gap: while Hell Grind used real people who licensed their likeness through Higgsfield's framework, the same platform already generates entirely original AI characters with no real person's likeness required. The next AI feature film may infringe nobody's copyright and use nobody's likeness. The NO FAKES Act, the TRAIN Act, the CLEAR Act, none would apply.

The petition's solution targets this gap at the source. AI video tools naturally struggle to maintain visual consistency across separate generations. Characters shift. Environments change. Faces drift. Higgsfield needed 16,000 generations to produce just 253 usable shots for Hell Grind, a 64:1 ratio that reveals how hard the technology must fight for the consistency filmmaking demands. Every major AI company is investing heavily to eliminate this natural drift. The petition asks legislators in the US, EU, UK, and Australia to mandate it instead.

The principle is straightforward: require AI tools to maintain subtle variation across characters, faces, environments, and continuity between separate generations. Any individual clip looks flawless. But those gentle inconsistencies accumulate across a feature film, making it non-consumable as cinema. Like a dream, vivid in pieces, never quite consistent enough to sustain. This guardrail does not require AI companies to build anything new. It requires them to preserve something that already exists in their technology, and prevent its removal.

This does not restrict short-form content, concept art, music videos, storyboarding, marketing, or any creative application. It addresses one capability only: producing consumable feature-length films and series that replace the need for human filmmaking.

The stakes are measured in millions of livelihoods. Over 2.5 million jobs in the United States alone. Over 1.2 million in Europe. Millions more worldwide. Hell Grind demonstrated that a single platform can now produce a feature film at 1% of the traditional cost with 1% of the traditional workforce. Without guardrails, this model scales.

The film industry has survived an existential technology threat before. Twenty years ago, piracy threatened to destroy cinema. It was met with smart, enforceable rules that made large-scale piracy commercially unviable, not by banning the technology, but by regulating the platforms that enabled it. This petition proposes the same approach for AI.

The petition proposes nine mechanisms across four categories: visual drift between generations, progressive drift within single generations, transparency through invisible watermarking and fingerprint registries, and international coordination. It targets only the 10-15 AI video generation companies building the tools, including OpenAI, Google, Runway, Kling, and Pika.

Cannes has ruled AI ineligible for official competition. SAG-AFTRA is negotiating its strongest protections yet. Over 400 Hollywood creatives have written to the White House. The EU AI Act takes effect August 2026. But none of these address guardrails on the generation tools themselves.

This petition does. And over 1,000 industry professionals have already signed it.

Javier Rodriguez
Protect The Film Industry
petition@protectthefilmindustry.org

Hell Grind Trailer

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