The film academy tied AI use to a human-authorship test

The process wall

Every spring the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences approves the awards rules and campaign promotional regulations for the coming Oscars, a routine act of housekeeping that quietly sets the standard every branch member applies while watching a submitted film. On 21 April 2025, that annual approval for the 98th Academy Awards added, for the first time, an explicit sentence on generative artificial intelligence and other digital tools, replacing informal branch custom with a stated test.

What the documents show

The Academy's press release announcing the 98th Oscars rules states that 'with regard to Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools used in the making of the film, the tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination,' and that voters 'will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship.' The release credits the wording to a recommendation from the Academy's Science and Technology Council. A year earlier, the equivalent release for the 97th Oscars, covering theatrical-run thresholds and scoring-credit changes, contained no mention of artificial intelligence, which places the new clause specifically in the 2025 cycle rather than earlier rule updates.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism is a neutrality statement paired with a human-authorship test, not a disclosure requirement or a ban. A film that used generative tools is stated to be neither advantaged nor penalised for that alone; branch members are instead asked to weigh how much of the creative authorship sat with a person, a judgement made individually rather than measured against a published checklist. The rule does not define which tools count as generative, does not require a submitting film to say where such tools were used, and creates no verification step beyond the Academy's existing eligibility affidavit process.

What survives

A film keeps its eligibility regardless of tool use, and a voter keeps discretion rather than a rulebook. Editorially, a standard framed this openly depends entirely on individual branch members' judgement of authorship, which is difficult for an outside reader to check case by case, or to compare consistently across categories.

• Check whether a given film's own production has said anywhere how digital tools were used, since the rule does not require that disclosure.
• Compare a season's public AI disclosures against the human-authorship standard rather than against a fixed percentage or checklist.
• Watch each year's rules announcement for amendments, which is where the Academy has historically recorded any tightening of language.

Because the clause arrived through the Academy's own annual rule-setting process rather than a dispute or a court test, its practical meaning will be set by how branch members actually vote in coming seasons rather than by the sentence itself.