The standards this work answers to

What the Foundation is

Fundacja ARTOS is an independent, international nonprofit platform for the responsible integration of new technologies and artificial intelligence into the film industry. Its stated purpose is to help filmmakers and producers adopt these tools without losing authorship, creative leadership, the quality of collaboration, or responsibility for the picture.

It was founded in response to a structural change rather than a trend. For the first time, images can be generated by an algorithm instead of captured by a camera — which moves where creative decisions are made, and unsettles how authorship is defined. Those are questions a standards body has to answer before a tool can be built against them.

It is organised like an open-source project

The Foundation is built on the MIT model of the Collaborative Innovation Network: a community bound by a shared mission rather than by hierarchy, in which knowledge, experimentation and leadership circulate freely, and every contribution returns to the network as a shared resource.

For a reader who arrived here through a calculator, that is the detail worth pausing on. It is an open-source governance model applied to a craft — the same reason a contribution to a shared codebase is worth more than the same work done privately, pointed at cinematography, production practice and legal standards instead.

The work runs on five pillars: research, education, production, community, and legal standards.

Why a $1.99 calculator inherits any of this

AL-1’s discipline is the Foundation’s discipline, applied to a tool. The confidence ladder that grades every price by the evidence behind it. The refusal to cost a route that cannot be costed honestly. The append-only dataset where a price change is a new row with the date it took effect, never an edit to the old one, so an old figure keeps saying when it was true.

None of those are features. They are what standards work looks like once it is compiled — and they are the honest through-line between a nonprofit setting norms for AI in film and a small calculator that will not overstate what it knows.

Where it works, and with whom

• Warsaw

  Headquartered at ATM Studio, and partnered with ATM Virtual for volume stages and research.

• Partners

  The Polish Society of Cinematographers (PSC), the Polish Filmmakers Union (ZZF), and the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School.

• Advisory

  Honorary board member Janusz Kamiński, two-time Academy Award winner. Founder and President of the Board: Bartosz Nalazek.

• Track record

  The Machine Cinema GenJam Director’s Cup drew 510 films from 16 countries. Two ARTOS crews finished on the podium.

How the two relate

ARTOS Labs extends the mission of the ARTOS Foundation by providing resources and knowledge for R&D programs that deliver tools for filmmakers using generative AI in production. The standards those tools answer to are the Foundation’s.

ARTOS Labs and the ARTOS Foundation are separate legal entities. Neither is a subsidiary, arm or department of the other.

Take part

Membership, donations and the network are handled by the Foundation directly.

For the Labs, write to hello@artoslabs.ai. For the Foundation, bartosz@artosfoundation.ai. Or start with what the Labs have shipped.