Vanity Fair's Cannes live file names "John Lennon: The Last Interview" as an out-of-competition film already generating controversy for its use of AI-generated imagery, which is enough to make it a Cannes item but not enough to make it a verdict on cinema, music estates, or synthetic biography. [1]

The useful question is not whether AI makes people angry, because it plainly does, but who has the authority to answer: an estate, rights holder, distributor, festival programmer, or filmmaker with a contract and a paper trail.

MSM can flag the controversy, X can turn it into an authenticity referendum before breakfast, and the paper wants the rights question because that is where moral panic becomes business consequence.

The next receipt is a rights-holder statement, distribution agreement, festival clarification, or legal challenge, since without one Cannes has an AI flare-up and with one it has an entertainment-industry precedent that tells readers who had the legal power to permit the images.

That distinction protects both sides of the argument, because artists deserve scrutiny for synthetic images and readers deserve to know whether the people who own the underlying rights consented before the festival spotlight arrived and the controversy hardened around them publicly.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles