Tom Cruise on AI: 'it's coming and it's going to happen'

Oman Film Festival opens submissions with a new AI film competition

Oman's national film festival now runs AI films as one of three main competitions, open only to Omani filmmakers until November 1, and its general rules bar any film already screened or posted online.

Oman's national film festival now gives AI work its own competition. The Oman Film Society opened submissions on September 21 for the 2026 Oman Film Festival, which runs December 28 to 31 with three main competitions: short narrative, short documentary and AI films, the last carrying an award for the best film made with AI technologies. Entry is limited to Omani filmmakers, with films completed in 2025 or 2026, running 3 to 35 minutes, subtitled in English and delivered in 1080p as MOV or MP4. The detail that matters most sits in the general rules, which say films must not have been screened or broadcast before on television, online platforms or any other public outlet. In practice, a short you have already posted to X or YouTube fails that test, so new work needs holding back until the November 1 deadline. This is the second AI competition in Oman in three weeks: the Muscat AI Film Festival opened entries on September 5 with RO 20,000 in main prizes, but every film there has to be made on the rmz.ai platform. Prize money for the new AI award and its judging criteria are still unpublished. Source: Oman Film Society via the Oman News Agency and the Times of Oman, September 21, 2026.

Robin Williams' daughter to the people making AI videos of him: 'have some shame'

Zelda Williams says a viral "private video" of her late father talking conspiracy theories is AI, and badly made AI. Control over a dead performer's likeness still runs through relatives who notice, not law.

Zelda Williams has asked the people making AI videos of her father to have some shame. The clip going around, passed off as a "private video" of Robin Williams talking about conspiracy theories, is "clearly AI, and not even particularly convincing AI", she wrote on X on Monday, and she pointed out that the voice alone gives it away to anyone who has actually watched his films. Her line to whoever built it: just because he's gone does not mean he's now your puppet.

Robin Williams died in 2014, and this is at least the third time in a year his daughter has had to say this in public. Last month she and her brothers Zak and Cody reopened their father's Instagram account, partly as an archive of real footage and partly to push back on what she called rampant AI abuse of his voice and likeness.

The part that reaches past one family is the enforcement gap. Control over a dead performer's likeness sits with relatives who happen to notice, not with a regulator. OpenAI paused Martin Luther King Jr. generations in October 2025 after his estate objected, and said authorized representatives or estate owners could request that a likeness be kept out of Sora cameos, which is an opt-out process that has to be repeated platform by platform. In practice, if your work leans on a real person, living or dead, get written permission from whoever holds those rights and file it with the project, because the family's answer outlasts the post.

Still open: which tool produced the clip, and whether any platform has taken it down.

Sources: Variety, Geo, The Verge, CNN, 21 and 22 September 2026