CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival can function like a global water cooler for movies, with prevailing issues and anxieties tending to come to the surface at the event. This year, the topic du jour is artificial intelligence.

The 79th Cannes may go down as the time the world's grandest film festival for the first time wrestled with the onset of AI - its arrival has been felt like a tsunami on the French Riviera. Its potential to remake the movie industry, for good or bad, has been an ongoing debate since the festival opened.