Spectacle Disguised as Tradition
Edward Bernays (1891–1995), typically referred to as the “father of public relations,” was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and a pioneering theorist of contemporary propaganda. Bernays was engaged by Woodrow Wilson to run the U.S. propaganda effort in World Struggle I—keep in mind “make the world protected for democracy”? Bernays took that throwaway line from a Wilson speech and made it a significant slogan that has echoes as we speak. He fused psychology and mass communication to “engineer consent,” operating campaigns for firms and governments that reshaped shopper tradition, from selling cigarettes to advertising and marketing bacon as breakfast. His ebook, “Propaganda” is the primer for all these characters.
Bernays taught firms that in the event you stage a spectacle, you’ll be able to reframe public notion. For instance, his “Torches of Freedom” marketing campaign for Fortunate Strike made cigarettes a logo of ladies’s liberation. “Fortunate Strike means effective tobacco” turned a commodity right into a cultural signifier, form of a precursor to “worth signaling”, like “This Home Smokes Luckys”.
AI movie festivals observe this Bernays-esque script: the purpose isn’t the movies, it’s the notion. By wrapping their merchandise within the glamour of movie premieres and pageant laurels, AI corporations try to rebrand exploitative instruments as inevitable inventive devices—it’s not only a Hershey bar, it’s a father’s love.
Third-Celebration Endorsement
Bernays relied on intermediaries — medical doctors, celebrities, socialites — to legitimize merchandise. As we speak, the Tribeca Pageant and IMAX screenings play the identical position. The message: if revered cultural establishments current AI movies, they have to be artwork. It’s not a tech firm telling you to simply accept AI — it’s a pageant, a status model, an arbiter of style.
The Draperization of AI
Mad Males’s Don Draper famously mentioned: “Promoting relies on one factor: happiness. And you realize what happiness is? Happiness is the scent of a brand new automotive. It’s freedom from concern.” Draper’s world was constructed on Bernays’ basis: flip a product into a sense.
AI movie festivals are Draper pitches on steroids. They promote the sensation of inclusion whereas obscuring the fact of exploitation.
AI movie festivals and awards depend on basic logical fallacies to fabricate legitimacy. They use enchantment to authority, leveraging establishments like Tribeca or IMAX to indicate AI-generated works are inherently creative. They deploy the bandwagon fallacy, citing hundreds of submissions as proof of cultural inevitability. The halo impact transfers status from revered festivals onto AI platforms, whereas false equivalence suggests pageant inclusion equals real creativity. Lastly, an enchantment to custom frames AI screenings alongside genuine cinema, normalizing them as in the event that they belonged. These fallacies distract from the underlying actuality: coercive adoption of instruments constructed on mass exploitation. And they’re all Dan Draper’s bread and butter, aka a hearty breakfast.
The YouTube Music Awards Precedent
When YouTube got here below hearth for low royalties and Google bought embarrassed by the backlash from model sponsored piracy, YouTube launched the YouTube Music Awards in 2013. Marketed as a celebration, the awards have been the truth is a PR stunt. AI movie festivals are as we speak’s model: shiny distractions meant to drown out artists’ criticism.
Don Draper would possibly pitch TorrentFreak’s “High 10 Most Pirated Films” as cultural legitimacy by numbers. On its face, it’s simply knowledge about torrent swarms. However the true impact is persuasion: reputation turns into legitimacy, and the underlying exploitation fades from view.
AI movie festivals play the identical sport. Runway’s AI Movie Pageant and Tribeca’s AI showcase wrap generative instruments in status to sign inevitability.
The Courtroom Double Cross
And right here is probably the most cynical layer: whereas AI platforms stage festivals for filmmakers, they wage a very completely different battle in courtrooms and legislatures.
In these venues — the place the filmmakers are absent — the identical corporations argue for protected harbors, copyright exceptions, and authorities safety just like the Trump AI Motion Plan that might absolve them from ever paying for scraping the historical past of tradition. We’ve seen this earlier than: Google fought authors and bought the primary corpus for AI coaching within the Google Books case by distorting “honest use” to some transmogrified beast. YouTube and Fb spent years torturing DMCA protected harbors. As we speak, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the opposite frontier labs push the identical protected harbor agenda in courts and legislatures around the globe.
It’s the outdated Bernays trick with a Silicon Valley replace: give artists a purple carpet, whereas your legal professionals foyer to be sure to by no means need to pay them.
From Bernays to the Algorithm: The Lineage of Manipulation
Bernays may solely dream of what Google, Fb, and TikTok perfected: manipulation at scale. The place Bernays relied on parades and promoting, these corporations constructed dopamine loops and suggestion engines. Generative AI is the pure extension of this lineage.
There could come a time when AI movies are festival-ready, however that point isn’t now.AI movie festivals aren’t celebrations of creativity; they’re propaganda rituals designed to normalize extraction by the richest firms in industrial historical past masquerading as “nationwide champion” tech corporations. Simply as Bernays reframed cigarettes as freedom, Draper bought happiness in Fortunate Strikes, and YouTube staged its hole awards present, AI corporations now promote inevitability by cultural spectacle.
Behind the glamour, the authorized methods inform the reality: these platforms need everlasting rights to use tradition with out compensation.
