World’s ‘first ever’ AI feature film ‘Hell Grind’ premieres at Cannes Film Festival

Bonjour, intelligence artificielle!

In a shocking first, a new movie made entirely using artificial intelligence premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival.

Called “Hell Grind,” the 95-minute flick took a team of 15 just two weeks to create and cost $500,000 — $400,000 of which went toward compute costs, according to the Wall Street Journal.

By contrast, Disney’s “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which hits theaters this weekend, had a reported production budget of $166.5 million.

San Francisco startup Higgsfield AI has billed their science-fiction experiment as “the world’s first ever AI feature film,” and even dropped a trailer for it on Wednesday.

Looking like a cheaper combination of “Mortal Kombat,” “Resident Evil” and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s packed with violent fantasy action sequences and has a gods-and-monsters plot. A narrator says, “Long before humans walked the earth, there was a war between angels and demons.”

The process to make “Hell Grind” was much more complex than jotting off a note to ChatGPT.

“You can’t go into AI and say, ‘Make me a 95-minute cool video,’ ” Adil Alimzhanov, a content lead at Higgsfield, told the Journal.

The creators had to input prompts into their tool with detailed style specifications (for example, “cine lens,” 180-degree shutter motion blur) averaging 3,000 words, and each would result in just 15 seconds of footage.

The final product was screened at the prestigious French festival, which has never shied away from controversy, to showcase the company’s impressive technology.

Higgsfield founder Alex Mashrabov wrote on LinkedIn, “This is the first AI film to demonstrate that AI can now sustain character consistency, world coherence, and narrative arc across a complete feature.”

AI has been a hot topic in Hollywood and at Cannes. The nearly four-month SAG-AFTRA strike that ground the industry to a halt in 2023 was staged in part because of concerns over its use. But this year, festival attendees have shown more openness to it.

“AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose,” actress Demi Moore said during a press conference.