A Hollywood awards body is taking a stand against AI content.
The Motion Picture Sound Editors group has announced that its prizes for the 2025 calendar year will not be open to any work in which Generative AI was used to create sound for the finished product, drawing a line in the sand that the Oscars, Emmys and other major bodies have yet to impose.
The ban for the MPSE’s Golden Reel Awards, which for now will apply only to this year, is meant to slow down a mainstreaming of the technology as it continues to come at Hollywood fast.
Related Stories
“There’s been a lot of circular conversation with no resulting action [in Hollywood]. In the meantime the technology has been exponentially growing at a rapid pace, 24/7, behind closed doors,” the MPSE’s president, David Barber, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “But I think we still have some agency in how this gets implemented.”
Barber added in a statement announcing the change that it is important to ask “how much of our humanity are we willing to give away to technology, especially in the arts?” noting starkly that “the time to ponder that question, set up boundaries, and guide how A.I. is assimilated into our workflow and lives was yesterday. The dam of A.I. has broken, and the waters are upon us. Choosing what we embrace as award-worthy filmmaking is a way of diverting those waters while we grapple with this exponential change.”
The MPSE’s Rules Committee voted recently after some intense debate, with a majority of the panel believing a year-long pause was the way to go. No decision has been made for the 2026 year or beyond, and the contenders featuring Gen AI could either be allowed back in or more permanently banned pending evolving standards, Barber said. A film that uses AI in one area (say, dialogue) but not another (such as effects) would still be eligible in the category where AI wasn’t used.
Generative AI is the technology by which media is created with a machine intelligence trained on data from past films, books, songs and audio tracks. Activists, creative guilds and critics have worried that allowing the systems free rein could displace jobs and reduce the level of human involvement in art. The companies developing the models have maintained they are simply trying to introduce new tools to the filmmaking process in the manner of previous tech waves.
The MPSE hands out a number of awards in sound categories, including for editing of dialogue, effects and music. Among the big winners last year in the film categories were Wicked, Saturday Night and Dune: Part Two. The group also hands out awards for television and video games, which will be subject to the same AI rules.
Last year, at least one major film contender was known to have used AI in its soundscape, A24’s The Brutalist, but it was not nominated for a Golden Reel.
While much of the Gen AI focus has been on video, the technology has not yet always caught up to the hype. Sound, on the other hand, has been a lower lift, and “voice-cloning” and other techniques can now easily make it seem like an actor said something they never did.
The news comes as studios are taking a more oppositional stance to generative AI. On Wednesday, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, an image-generator they allege was unlawfully trained on scenes from their movies.
Barber says he hopes the Golden Reels decision gives pause to filmmakers who might think about using Generative AI. He also wants the move to spur other awards groups to follow suit.
“A lot of conversations feel like the future is a fait accompli, that whatever is destined to happen will happen and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Barber noted. “To date, no one has really said ‘hold on, maybe we can resist this.’ People need to talk about this and people need to see you can do something about it.”
The Motion Picture Academy has not taken a position on AI at the Oscars, adding in April to its rules a clause that “the tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination,” though it did say, somewhat cryptically, that branches would take into account “the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award.”
