LOS ANGELES—Cultpix, an online streaming platform offering B films, cult features, and other niche genres, debuted experimental project Sh(AI)ved Vol. 1 during the prestigious Cannes Film Festival that concluded last weekend.
For reference, the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, was awarded to the Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu for his political drama Fjord.
On the sidelines of the festival, Cultpix screened Sh(AI)ved, a collection of short films, as a demonstration of artificial intelligence (AI) being utilized in a novel application. A phyiscal version of this collection is due to be released through the Klubb Super 8 label.
To create Sh(AI)ved, the Norwegian company Multiformat and its owner, Thomas Meier, used generative AI, drawing on source material from erotic magazine photo spreads published over 50 years ago. Meier converted still images captured from 1976 erotic spreads into fully animated, brought-to-life sequences, complete with color, synchronized sound, written dialogue and voiceover. Rickard Gramfors, the CEO of Cultpix, said that the aim was to showcase "a conversation between past risqué aesthetics and new technology."
Patrick von Sychowski, the London-based co-founder of Cultipix, shared this sentiment with AVN.
He explained, "Cultpix, and before it Klubb Super 8, have a long history of restoring 1970s erotica (and earlier) and bringing it to new and appreciative audiences. As well as buying 35mm and 16mm prints of various films (over 350 titles in our warehouse outside Stockholm), we have released such films on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray.
"When Thomas Meier came to us with a proposal to create new titles based on photographic material from the 1970s, we were naturally intrigued to see how they would compare to actual films of the period," von Sychowski said. "The experiment has pleasantly surprised us, and we now see it as a niche all its own.
"The boundaries between preservation, transformation and invention are forever shifting, defined by whatever tools happen to be available," he posited. "Digital tools opened up possibilities that were simply not feasible with photo-chemical and analogue film handling.
"To that mix, I would add accessibility, because a preserved and restored film serves no purpose if it only sits in a vault or on a hard drive," von Sychowski said.
"The whole point of Klubb Super 8 and Cultpix has always been to bring back the kind of films that critics and film historians would rather forget, but which had a far bigger impact on mass audiences than the niche arthouse titles vaunted at Cannes and elsewhere."
Not everyone is sold on the project. For example, MelRose Michaels of Sex Work CEO posted an analysis on Instagram that classified the release as troubling.
"The Cannes premiere has sparked sharp criticism from real adult creators who are watching their own content get censored, deplatformed, and demonetized at the same time," she wrote. "The frustration is direct and hard to argue with. Adult content made by living, consenting [sex workers] gets flagged and removed. AI-generated adult material built from the images of SWers without their ongoing consent gets a prestigious film festival screening and mainstream press coverage. For creators, this story lands in a specific way.
"The industry that profits from the aesthetic and labor of SWers keeps finding ways to extract that value while the actual workers remain disposable," Michaels added. And that sentiment is critical to understanding how opposition to artificial intelligence replacing human capabilities extends to other debates, including intellectual property rights.
AVN was able to confirm with Cultpix that it has a "commercial agreement" in place with the rights holders of the source material. But von Sychowski declined to comment further, citing the sensitivity of the agreement and the parties.
He noted, "Copyright is deeply important to us, not least because we ourselves own the rights to a library of 80 to 90 Swedish genre classics, which form the foundation of our work. So we are keenly aware of the pitfalls of new technology, and we accept that rights holders have to be compensated, not least to help pay for the still-expensive work of restoring old films and making them accessible."
But even with the "pitfalls of new technology," there is concern for the rights of adult content creators and the rights holders overall.
Von Sychowski concluded, "We discussed these and related issues at length before deciding to embark on this. We were guided by the fact that photographic evidence exists showing these performers consented to have their sex acts recorded by cameras." As such, it remains to be seen what the release of Sh(AI)ved will do to IP litigation.
Speaking with some hesitancy about the project, adult entertainment industry attorney Corey Silverstein told AVN that these "vintage" films are at the "intersection of several unresolved legal issues." Silverstein noted, "First, there’s the question of training data: if the models were trained on copyrighted adult films, photographs, magazine spreads or performer likenesses without authorization, rights holders may argue that the resulting works are derivative or infringing.
"Second, even if the final output is technically new, it may still create liability if it recreates recognizable performers, characters, visual styles, trademarks or copyrighted scenes," he added. "The other side of the equation is ownership. In the United States, copyright protection generally requires human authorship."
Federal courts have affirmed this sentiment of human authorship and ownership. In 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in the landmark appellate case of Thaler v. Perlmutter that federal copyright laws require all works to be authored by a human being. The court ruled that a work created entirely by an AI system cannot receive similar copyright protection, reinforcing the principle that artificial intelligence can be a creative tool, but under current law it cannot itself be the creator for copyright purposes.
Jordan Feirman, Stuart D. Levi and Mana Ghaemmaghami, writing in a legal analysis for their law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom LLP, note that while the Copyright Act of 1976 "does not define the term 'author,' multiple provisions within the act, and the act 'taken as a whole,' make clear that authors must be humans, not machines."
"The court’s decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter aligns with the findings and recommendations of the U.S. Copyright Office's January 2025 report on copyright and artificial intelligence," the analysis concludes. "That report reaffirmed the necessity of human authorship for copyright protection, emphasizing that while AI can assist in the creative process, the final work must reflect human creative input to be eligible for copyright."
The report referenced by Feirman, Levi and Ghaemmaghami emphasizes the need for substantial human contribution.
"The more autonomous the AI generation process becomes, the harder it may be for producers to claim robust copyright protection over the finished film," observed Silverstein. "That creates a strange scenario where a producer could face infringement claims over the input while simultaneously having limited rights in the output.
"For the adult industry specifically, there are additional concerns involving rights of publicity and performer consent," he concluded. "If AI-generated content evokes or replicates the image, persona or performance style of real adult entertainers, even without using their actual footage, we’re likely to see litigation focused on misappropriation, false endorsement and digital replica rights. As AI filmmaking moves from novelty to commercial reality, the industry will need clearer licensing frameworks for training data and performer protections."
