Superhuman effort. Work that wins at Cannes demands it.
Impassioned, often maniacally long hours on top of your ordinary workload. Creating. Polishing. Client whispering.
Then there’s case study crafting. Edit v.81 isn’t unfamiliar; it’s a case study badge of honour. But this year, Cannes has a new subcategory in its Craft track. The very topical AI Craft. Entries opened last week, and there’s a notable prerequisite to winning. You’ll need more than superhuman effort.
Winners must truly be superhuman
Last year’s press release announcing AI Craft explained that “the craft-led Lion will recognise work where human creativity and artificial intelligence come together to create ideas that neither could achieve alone.”
This demands the best manifestation of AI creativity. Not slop, but supremacy. Elite-level creativity that befits a festival of Cannes’ calibre. We’re talking mind-blowing, unimaginable visuals and technical accomplishments so spectacular they’d make Sam Altman weep.
But let’s unpack that last line a little more.
Ideas that neither AI nor humans could achieve alone.
This poses a whole new kind of creativity, one that transcends what Cannes has traditionally awarded.
From better captioning for the Deaf community to Michael Cera selling skincare while communing with a narwhal, Cannes celebrates creativity in all its envy-inducing forms.
And until now, that creativity was human. But with its new category, Cannes dangles the tantalising suggestion of creativity that’s better than human. Creativity that could only exist by partnering with machines.
This year’s festival will unleash a new creative standard: supercharged and superhuman.
It’s thrilling, in a slightly stomach-churning way. And it poses a raft of existential questions that all award shows must answer.
How will human judges assess superhuman creativity? If the best of AI Craft should transcend what humans know or can achieve alone, that sets a punishingly high bar for juries at any show.
To truly assess it, shouldn’t all juries now include AI judges? Or at least some kind of transhuman with a creativity chip embedded in their skull?
What’s also yet to be resolved is the unit of creativity juries should use to measure AI work.
In every award show, the Craft track awards human skill and human taste. Editing, direction, animation, design. These disciplines are already augmented by machines, yet they carry unmistakable human fingerprints. They’re shaped by human standards, so human judges can assess them.
But the craft of superhuman creativity is more opaque.
Will judges award the skill of prompting? Is the human taste required to manipulate the output? Perhaps they’ll be recognising work that perfects the dance between human and AI production.
The time lag between work launches and being judged is yet another variable. The field is evolving so rapidly that a landmark technical achievement in January could be obsolete by July—or so automated that almost anyone could replicate it.
These are questions every award show must grapple with. Cannes’ AI Craft launch means the 2026 Craft juries will define what excellence means in a very public way.
AI already exists across the entire Cannes festival. In some cases, like the Heinz AI ketchup bottle campaign, it’s been used cleverly to award-winning effect. In others, it’s gone unspoken until discovered.
So Cannes is leading with its decision not to disguise AI’s role in Craft, but to push creatives to strive for excellence.
Cannes is also acknowledging the industry’s future, with all its thrilling possibilities and inevitable pitfalls.
But any human effort to judge AI is also corralling an untameable beast.
It’s soothing for humans to decide what qualifies as brilliant AI. By handing out awards, we reassure ourselves that we, and not the machines, are the apex predator.
But in truth, we don’t know where AI is going, how it will ultimately shape creativity or how to judge its output.
Grappling with the implications of AI Craft requires an analysis closer to spiritual than mechanical. We need to decide what we want creativity to be, at Cannes and everywhere. Central to that is deciding how much humanity we’re prepared to hand over to machines.
A flawed and messy inquiry into a dazzlingly technical field. That’s the truly superhuman task ahead of us all.
Hilary Badger is an ECD at Leo Australia.
