Artificial Intelligence

In the Legal Billing

A dim studio at dusk: a large abstract painted panel on an easel, lit by a single lamp, its lower corner left as bare wood, with a row of empty wooden stands receding into shadow beside it.

On 4 December a film made with generative AI opens on fewer than 1,000 screens in the United States, and the studio behind it, Fable, will submit it for Best Animated Feature (Forbes). It was going to open on 30 October; the date moved to sit closer to awards season (Net Influencer, citing Variety and Forbes). It is the first fully AI-generated feature to carry an MPA rating, which is R (Futurism). I have not seen it and will not pretend to have an opinion on it.

Whether it is eligible will not be settled by watching it. It will be settled by reading a document. The Academy’s complete rules for the 99th Oscars are public, and the word that matters appears in three places in them, doing three different jobs.

Rule Two, paragraph seven

The first is in eligibility. “With regard to Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools used in the making of the film,” the Academy will judge the achievement “taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship” (99th Oscars rules). Its own announcement of 1 May put the working part more plainly: the Academy “reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use and human authorship” (press.oscars.org). A right to ask. No threshold, no proportion, nothing a submitter files unless somebody asks for it.

Rule Six, paragraph one

The second is in acting, and it is built differently. A performance qualifies if it is “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” (TechCrunch, quoting the rule; the rules themselves carry “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent will be considered eligible”). Two words appear here that are nowhere in Rule Two. Demonstrably, which is a burden of proof. Consent, which is a right. Consent is attached to performers and to nobody else in the rulebook, and it is attached to them because performers struck in 2023 and spent the years since bargaining over precisely this. Screenplays get the shorter version: they “must be human-authored to be eligible” (press.oscars.org). Writers also have a union, and also struck.

Rule Seven, section one

The third is in the definition of the category this film is entering. An animated film, the rules say, is one “in which characters or objects are given the illusion of life,” and “animation is the craft of human creation and manipulation of images to produce a performance from inanimate objects.” At least 75 per cent of the running time, credits excluded, must carry animation of the primary subject. The rules can count when they want to.

That sentence contains the word, but it is not a test. It is a description of a craft, with no filing attached and no adverb. Read strictly it decides the case before anyone opens a submission form, since a film in which no human created or manipulated the images is not an animated film and cannot be entered. Read as it will actually be read, it is scenery. Fable’s chief executive has called the film “a seminal, historic moment in animation” and said it could be “this generation’s Toy Story” (Net Influencer). The director’s position is that “I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s an AI movie” (Forbes), and he points to the human writers, voice actors, musicians and Foley artists behind it. The defence and the rule are made of the same material: a page of credits.

Which is the thing worth noticing, because billing is the most negotiated object in a production. Who appears in the legal billing, in what order, at what size, is settled by agents, unions and lawyers long before anyone calls it an achievement. So the strength of a craft’s protection in the rules tracks its strength at the bargaining table almost exactly: consent for actors, authorship for writers, a right to make enquiries about everyone else.

The same gradient is visible in the agreements themselves this month. SAG-AFTRA’s television animation deal, with voting open until 29 October, expands AI protections for voice performers and guarantees a 3 per cent wage rise in each of its four years (Cartoon Brew). The Animation Guild’s own account of what it won in 2024, for the people who would do the animating, is “AI protections including written notifications and the ability to consult with the production,” plus help to “identify alternative non-GenAI tools” (TAG). In games, the contracts ratified for nearly 1,900 Blizzard workers in September “require Blizzard to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the usage of artificial intelligence” (CWA). Consent at one end of the gradient, a meeting at the other.

My own trade has had this problem for longer and handled it better, because the saleroom never pretended authorship was binary. It grades. “By” means the house stakes its reputation on the hand. “Attributed to” means the work is “probably by the artist, at least in part, but the auction house isn’t 100 percent sure.” “Studio of” means “a work executed in the studio or workshop of the artist, possibly under his supervision” — someone else held the brush. Then “Follower of,” “Circle of,” “Manner of,” and “After,” which is a copy (Artnet News, 2019). The grading has teeth: a lawyer quoted in that piece notes the conditions of sale guarantee authorship only “as described in bold or capitalized letters in the catalogue,” and a buyer has less recourse the further the wording drifts from a name. “School of,” she says, “has no legal meaning at all.”

Seven rungs, each carrying a different liability, built over roughly a century of litigation by people who knew a panel can be thirty per cent one hand and seventy per cent another and still has to be sold on a Tuesday. The Academy, facing the same problem with much better information available to it, has one rung and a right to make enquiries. My guess is that what forces a finer vocabulary will not be the generated images but a film of this kind winning something, followed by an argument about which of the human writers, voice actors, musicians and Foley artists was at the heart of the creative authorship. That argument has an answer in percentages. Nobody has been asked for them, and there is no box on the form.

The animators have written notification and the ability to consult. Their guild ratified that by 76.1 per cent of valid votes cast.

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