The Oscars just banned AI from winning acting and writing awards

5/3/2026 at 6:53:23 PM

Good. The intangibles of art are undeniable.

- emotional connection

- aesthetics

- zeitgeist

- lived experience

- artist journey

You're free to fall in love with your sexbot, but it's still just jerking off.

by Papazsazsa

5/3/2026 at 7:04:40 PM

And what is falling in love with an actor? Not jerking off?

by _alternator_

5/3/2026 at 7:37:19 PM

It's certainly a lot less messy!

by Papazsazsa

5/4/2026 at 1:48:15 AM

My point is that falling in love with an actor is (usually) falling in love with an idea or image, not an actual person, and in that way it's not that much different than jacking off.

by _alternator_

5/4/2026 at 12:19:43 AM

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by Rekindle8090

5/3/2026 at 6:59:52 PM

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by ejje

5/3/2026 at 7:29:47 PM

Let's not start comments with "Shhh" on HN, ok? Leave it for reddit.

by karmakurtisaani

5/3/2026 at 6:09:58 PM

Obviously just performative signalling that doesn't really do much. You can't definitively tell if AI was used, so the rule can never realistically be enforced.

Then again, the Oscars are surely almost entirely vibes based anyway. So it's hardly some internally consistent system of merit in the first place.

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 6:48:34 PM

I wish we could stop the slide of the term "performative" into meaninglessness.

Just because something is hard or even impossible to enforce, doesn't mean you don't state that it is not allowed and that there are consequences for being caught. That's a common fallacy that overly engineering-minded people fall into.

We're humans. We care about things. There is nothing strange about me asking you not to do something that I can't stop you from doing.

by happytoexplain

5/3/2026 at 6:57:21 PM

There is absolutely no fallacy in the statement you're responding to. Laws are meaningless if they cannot be consistently enforced.

by chungusamongus

5/4/2026 at 10:17:50 AM

> "Laws are meaningless if they cannot be consistently enforced."

Laws, per se, are not meaningless. How effective they are is utterly irrelevant in this context; it's another question altogether.

by spankibalt

5/3/2026 at 7:08:51 PM

Actually, laws can be really effective even if they are only enforced intermittently.

by AndrewDucker

5/3/2026 at 7:19:37 PM

I'm not sure how true this is.

If you consider low-stakes crimes, typically to get to a steady state of effectiveness you need at least some sort of bootstrapped period of ubiquitous enforcement. If that's impossible then I'm not sure you ever get to effectiveness.

If we're talking high-stakes, death-penalty-lottery-if-you-break-the-rules type stuff, then I think actually detection rate (i.e. consistent enforcement) is the biggest predictor of reduced rates, not severity of punishment.

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 7:34:08 PM

Sure, but even giving 100% of the benefit of the doubt you're raising, it still doesn't follow that it is purely "performative" to formally establish a rule just because it may soon become impossible to identify rule-breakers without whistle-blowers or intel.

by happytoexplain

5/3/2026 at 7:35:49 PM

Well what purpose does the rule serve if it can't be enforced, if not signalling/norming?

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 8:13:53 PM

Your premise is fallacious - at best, it is partially enforceable (like I said: whistle-blowers, intel), which gives it teeth (not necessarily much, but more than zero, which makes it useful to some non-zero extent).

Even at worst, it expresses intent, which has meaning to humans. We are humans. I can't force you to do anything, but I can ask you to. Don't disparage what it means to be humans talking to each other - it's one of the few things we have left on Earth.

by happytoexplain

5/3/2026 at 9:15:48 PM

> Even at worst, it expresses intent, which has meaning to humans. We are humans. I can't force you to do anything, but I can ask you to. Don't disparage what it means to be humans talking to each other - it's one of the few things we have left on Earth.

Isn't that what... signalling is?

by 0x3f

5/4/2026 at 1:26:54 AM

And laws can be completely useless when enforced intermittently.

Laws that are enforced and more importantly are enforceable have a much higher rate of making a difference. The same works here.

by SideQuark

5/3/2026 at 7:10:45 PM

That just doesn't follow.

by happytoexplain

5/3/2026 at 6:55:56 PM

How are there consequences for being caught if it's impossible to detect?

Moreover, why stop here? There are many great rules that are impossible to enforce. Why not a rule that the author isn't allowed to have any racist thoughts when writing the material?

We can't read minds, but it sure is a nice thing to care about, don't you think?

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 7:29:46 PM

It doesn’t always have to have consequences when it’s a curated access club like the Oscars. It’s ok to have cultural norms that aren’t enforced by consequences, at the very least some of the ethical participants will follow them. I know that I try to follow the spirit of the clubs I participate in, and if they don’t have these types of statements often I just don’t know what the community thinks is ok.

It breaks down when assholes join, or the overly self-interested. This mindset permeates America today, but there are still many collective organizations that don’t need punitive measures. These are less common but when you find them, it’s often a positive signal.

by edmundsauto

5/4/2026 at 12:20:54 AM

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by Rekindle8090

5/3/2026 at 7:05:26 PM

I guess the Best Visual Effects category is going to be tough to judge, but don't you think it might be quite hard to win the Best Actress Academy Award if your AI-generated heroine can't come get the trophy?

Also, "truth" is a thing that exists, and just because you can't always tell if somebody cheated the rules or not, does not mean the rules are "performative signalling".

by sebastiennight

5/3/2026 at 7:31:33 PM

I don't think AI-generated 'avatars' are anywhere close to being Oscar-worthy as things stand, so it seems kind of a moot point (hence the 'signalling' thing).

If they ever get that good, I would just say you can't really fight the market. If AI content is good enough that people want it, then the Oscars just get left behind after a while. But that's fine, and up to them.

> Also, "truth" is a thing that exists, and just because you can't always tell if somebody cheated the rules or not, does not mean the rules are "performative signalling".

I don't really understand. If you can't hope to discover the truth, in what way is it not performative or signalling?

by 0x3f

5/4/2026 at 12:30:14 PM

> If they ever get that good, I would just say you can't really fight the market. If AI content is good enough that people want it

It might be "good enough" that you can't see the difference, which is not equivalent to "people want it". Maybe if people knew that "it"'s not the real thing, they'd assign lower value to "it".

Our startup works in video editing. It's not that difficult to foresee that you might be a true fan of [insert your favorite podcaster or content creator], and maybe some AI models would enable $podcaster to duplicate themselves "perfectly", but as a true fan you'd still feel betrayed to learn you just listened to 2 hours of slop that $podcaster was not involved in.

"Ha! You say you're vegan but I just tricked you into eating meat-disguised-as-veggies" isn't the most convincing gotcha.

by sebastiennight

5/3/2026 at 6:33:25 PM

It prevents anyone from blatantly using AI. If they want to use it anyway and risk getting found out, sure. That's still a big difference.

by frollogaston

5/3/2026 at 6:57:43 PM

Can you explain how an Oscar-worthy piece of writing would somehow be able to contain blatant AI-generated content? How would it have already passed the good-enough-for-an-Oscar filter?

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 7:04:27 PM

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by chungusamongus

5/3/2026 at 6:16:10 PM

The younger generation also increasingly pays less attention to traditional mainstream entertainment and media, as now they can create more of it with AI.

Edit: funny to see the anti-AI crowd showing up again, how predictable... you can downvote but you can't stop the truth! Legacy entertainment is dying, and will soon become irrelevant.

by userbinator

5/3/2026 at 8:37:02 PM

I’m downvoting because it’s an unusual (and probably false) claim made with no evidence — particularly your clause after “as” needs a more substantive defense. Can you convince me a bit that you speak for the younger generation?

by npinsker

5/3/2026 at 6:24:54 PM

You can't definitively tell if athletes are doping, or students are cheating, it should then be allowed.

by NicuCalcea

5/3/2026 at 6:53:49 PM

It's much easier to tell if athletes are doping than to 'detect' AI in text that's already Oscar-for-writing level good. I would suggest the latter is quite literally impossible.

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 7:31:31 PM

I have always heard that dopers are consistently ahead of testing regimes. I don’t think it is easier to tell than AI, which always seems pretty obvious to me.

by edmundsauto

5/3/2026 at 7:34:20 PM

You have to consider that any AI content worthy of the Oscar shortlist is going to be very high-quality, and likely intensely hand/human-tweaked in the first place. It's not from the general population of all AI content out there.

> I have always heard that dopers are consistently ahead of testing regimes

I don't know about that, even the very biggest names with the most funding quite often get dinged for it. I suppose I'm not really saying that the detection rate for doping is high, though, just that it's much higher than AI detection in high-quality content (which I would suggest is approximately zero).

by 0x3f

5/3/2026 at 8:45:56 PM

How do you know that it's easier? How do you prove athletes who have not been caught doping were in fact not doping?

by NicuCalcea

5/3/2026 at 11:49:56 PM

> banned ai from winning acting

Aren't most cgi acting already unable to be nominated for acting award - even when theres much more deliberate human involvement in the cgi acting? Or maybe they could have been nomination but never was? I see no ambiguity here: if there's no actor that performed anything for the genAI result there's no actor to be nominated. Does this need clarification?

> banned ai from winning writing awards

I'm going to be looking into how this is enforced/investigated. Again: a human must claim they wrote the script.

by 627467

5/3/2026 at 6:49:28 PM

Given the latest court ruling in March that AI works can't be copyrighted, this makes a lot of sense. The movie itself can't be copyrighted if it uses AI (although there is still some unresolved issues around how much AI).

by jedberg

5/3/2026 at 6:54:46 PM

Hah, no. Just because AI was employed in the production to some extent doesn't mean it can't be copyrighted. It is not so black and white. You are not describing the situation accurately.

by chungusamongus

5/3/2026 at 7:12:45 PM

I literally said: "although there is still some unresolved issues around how much AI"

Which is really the crux of the issue.

by jedberg

5/3/2026 at 7:41:09 PM

I would expect that ruling to be overturned at some point. AI is going to be how people work. And saying it can the copyrighted is going to look increasingly absurd, like saying anything produced with Adobe tools can’t be copyrighted.

by SilverElfin

5/3/2026 at 8:15:07 PM

I actually agree with you. Between lobbying from the AI companies, artists when they realize it's a tool they can use to enhance their own work, and probably the movie makers themselves when the realize how much their own people want to use it, it will either be overturned or the laws will be much clearer.

by jedberg

5/3/2026 at 6:23:53 PM

I would be surprised if it weren't already de facto banned, like how motion capture performances are essentially banned from Best Actor/Actress awards

by jedimastert

5/3/2026 at 6:26:21 PM

Why should motion capture be banned from those awards?

by _aavaa_

5/3/2026 at 6:40:59 PM

I didn't say should, I said are.

The rationale (which, again, I'm not arguing for or against) is that mocap performances are not strictly speaking totally the actors, because mocap has to be cleaned and can be (and very often is) edited and tweaked after the fact by animators. Not to mention there are often required liberties taken because a model cannot line up one to one with an actor anatomically.

In a sense, mocap performances are done by a team of animators where one animator puppeted a model in real time.

by jedimastert

5/3/2026 at 6:32:16 PM

I don't know, but Andy Serkis was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination because Gollum was regarded as "just a CG Character".

by chuckadams

5/3/2026 at 6:35:40 PM

Half of Andy Serkis' job portraying Gollum was done by animators, even though Serkis provided the basic facial expressions.

I would've given him the best voice acting award though.

by guitarlimeo

5/3/2026 at 6:40:49 PM

Every last motion Gollum makes was Serkis doing it, including when he's jumping up on rocks and climbing down head-first. The animators certainly deserve credit for the facial expressions and the rest of the work of the digital costume, but he physically acted the part.

by chuckadams

5/3/2026 at 7:36:52 PM

There was a comparable controversy with The Exorcist because Linda Blair was dubbed.

by bhickey

5/3/2026 at 6:24:13 PM

Obvious decision for any institution with at least a modicum of artistic self-respect.

by spankibalt

5/3/2026 at 6:50:21 PM

agreed, as AI is more widely adopted in cinematography i assume they will start adding categories specifically for it... hate the idea of them ever competing directly against actual humans performing

by jmp1062

5/3/2026 at 7:01:38 PM

They already have categories for animation and post visual effects. They just don't necessarily show those awards during the broadcast

by dylan604

5/3/2026 at 7:48:50 PM

Someone should tell Valerie Cherish.

by andsoitis

5/3/2026 at 7:39:49 PM

The Oscars and Hollywood are already quite irrelevant. Looking down on AI and its potential to produce better entertainment is just a sign that they’re scared of its potential.

by SilverElfin

5/3/2026 at 6:58:45 PM

Remember when they tried to ban computers from winning best special effects? Tron, famously.

by ekjhgkejhgk

5/3/2026 at 9:13:27 PM

I found some more details about this, for anyone interested. It looks like critics of Tron's visual effects mistakenly thought the computer was generating it all for them, with little human input, when it was actually quite a laborious process.

"Tron’s offices were trailers in the Disney parking lot, recalls Chris Wedge, then an animator for MAGI, who worked on Tron’s light cycle sequences. “[That’s] because the Disney animation department didn’t believe that this was animation,” he says. “They thought it was computers just making effects. They just didn’t understand anything about it.”"

"Tron’s distinctive glowing circuitry was achieved through a technique called backlight animation, which involves making a negative of each frame and hand-painting the glowing areas. There were 75,000 frames to do; more than half a million pieces of artwork."

"Star Wars and Alien both feature 3D wireframe graphics projected on screens. Only a few companies could produce such images, each of which had their own room-sized computer and their own custom-built software. The process was still cumbersome. “We had to figure out how to position and render objects 24 times to make one second of perceived movement on the screen,” says Bill Kroyer, Tron’s head of computer animation. Tron’s animators had to map out the CGI scenes on graph paper, then calculate the coordinates and angles for each element in each frame."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/05/tron-steven-lis...

by maplethorpe

5/3/2026 at 6:28:55 PM

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by hottrends