🎬 Horror Master M. Night Clicks Into YouTube

1. YouTube has been pulling in big-name celebrities and news anchors in growing numbers over the last few years, but most major Hollywood film directors have stayed away from fully adopting the platform. That time is now over. Director M. Night Shyamalan has just launched his personal YouTube channel. Filmed outside of his private office, Shyamalan says part of the reason for launching the YouTube channel was to “undo whatever stigmas are in my head, or in anybody’s head.”

It’s not clear what stigma he’s referring to, but some might guess it has to do with his up-and-down directing career. After an early meteoric rise, fueled by his Oscar-nominated film The Sixth Sense and then Unbreakable, his creative reputation began to wane after the release of Lady in the Water (Bryce Dallas Howard, Paul Giamatti), The Happening (Mark Wahlberg), and After Earth (Will Smith). Since then, M. Night has struggled to get out of “director jail” and has gradually succeeded with cult hits Split (James McAvoy), Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), Apple TV’s Servant (Nell Tiger Free, Lauren Ambrose), and Knock at the Cabin (Dave Bautista).

Shyamalan has always been one of the great experimentalists in Hollywood, often with a bent toward horror or the supernatural. But Hollywood serves at the altar of hits, not necessarily innovation in the realm of unorthodox screenplays and unusual themes. That’s why YouTube may be the perfect playground for Shyamalan, especially now that there’s no longer any “stigma” around being on the platform, with the Academy Awards set to broadcast the Oscars on YouTube in 2029.

What’s Really Happening Here: More than anything, my read is that Shyamalan’s YouTube turn is based on the current frenzy in Hollywood to sign directors with interesting Internet (read: Reddit) community-driven stories, often independently developed on YouTube. Case in point: Kane Parsons. YouTube was the cinematic birthplace of fellow horror auteur Parsons, whose Backrooms film is now the most successful A24 film ever at nearly $400 million in worldwide box office revenue.

Shyamalan, who has always been a nimble filmmaker, has been paying attention and is wisely embracing the Internet platform that is poised to launch many new directing careers. “I’ve been really excited about this for a while, and so today is a really special day for me,” said Shyamalan. “Make sure to subscribe to see my next upload this Sunday, it’s a good one.”

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

For Wall Street insiders, Stanley Druckenmiller is a legendary hedge fund manager and macro investor whose words can move markets. To the general public, who only occasionally glance at the financial news headlines, he’s just another bold-faced billionaire name who gets feverishly quoted by the finance bro/broette community. Both descriptions are true, but in 2026, a new distinction must be added to his online identity: if you quote Druckenmiller, you may not actually be quoting the man, but rather a statistical approximation of his opinion, rendered in the words of AI.

This was revealed today following Druckenmiller’s Wall Street Journal opinion article, published on Monday, where he criticized the fiscal policy of his former ‘90s-era mentee, current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Aside from the policy prescriptions and market warnings embedded in the piece, readers noticed something odd. It seemed to contain a lot of the now obvious telltale signs of AI-generated text.

It didn’t take long for the Internet to weigh in, widely branding the op-ed “AI slop.” Notably, former White House senior economist and member of the Federal Reserve Board Claudia Sahm posted the results of a Pangram AI detection test on her Twitter/X profile. The results: 100% AI-generated. Of course, none of the current AI detectors are considered infallible, but those kinds of results for brand new text are usually an indication of the presence of some AI-generated text.

The AI mystery was dispelled this morning after Druckenmiller admitted, “Of course I used AI,” in an interview with political news website NOTUS. Such disclosures are becoming increasingly common. But it’s the subsequent statement from Druckenmiller that got my attention: “There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major… I’m not embarrassed by it … I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”

Finally! Someone from the business community crystallized the pernicious fallacy I’ve been obsessing over for the past few years when it comes to AI-generated writing. By comparing the use of AI-generated text for human opinion to using a calculator to arrive at math solutions, Druckenmiller has revealed the exact reason why allowing AI to speak for you is so dangerous.

Why Business Leaders Are In Love With AI Writing

To do big things, you need a lot of confidence. Some might even call it arrogance, or chutzpah, whatever you call it, you often need to believe in your own ideas more than your doubters in order to get ambitious things done. Regardless of political stripe, this ethos undergirds many of the most successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and finance experts. And in this realm, the scoreboard isn’t intellectual veracity, it’s money. Profit. Number Go Up. Full stop.

Making these numbers go up often involves a series of logic chains and efficiencies that primarily respect the unforgiving taskmaster of math and statistics. Nuance isn’t necessarily appreciated, unless, of course, it’s backed by numbers, in which case, it’s no longer really nuance, it’s just fact. Thinking like this becomes a mental muscle that many business leaders pride themselves in enhancing and flexing. That’s why, prior to the rise of commercial AI chatbots, the market for corporate ghostwriters was never better. Business leaders accustomed to thinking in stark numbers, married with their previously seldom publicly discussed social theory, often struggled with the subtle poetry of sculpting their thoughts in a way that evokes mental imagery that resonates with the public and speaks beyond the bottom line of profit and loss.

Then came ChatGPT, Claude, and a range of other AI chatbots, all giving anyone with a $20-a-month subscription an easy way to write a 3,000-word essay of seemingly brilliant, albeit often formulaic, “original” opinion on any topic you could think of. But there’s the rub. The human AI chatbot subscriber isn’t doing the thinking. Generally, the algorithm is. No matter, in the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of long essays on Twitter/X and LinkedIn from business leaders who had previously never publicly posted anything more than a paragraph about some layoff, product recall, or new hiring. The effect has been the gradual normalization of some of our most notable business leaders (as well as some professors and non-fiction authors) casually allowing an algorithm to seemingly do most of their thinking. The conceit being that it’s good enough and more efficient because it’s faster.

But writing isn’t math. The laptop isn’t a wall, the keyboard isn’t a nail, and your fingers aren’t a hammer, the combination simply awaiting the user to pound (type) in obvious universal logic, as a calculator might. Calculators produce deterministic math. If those numbers are massaged by the human to engage in statistical nuance after the calculation, that is the human mind at work, cogitating, not the calculator. If you have a business philosophy, you may include your number-based logic within your argument. But if you do not wrap that logic in your own human-nuanced understanding of the world, and instead leave those “flowery expository bits” to AI, you are doing nothing but affixing your name to the “thoughts” of an algorithm.

Sure, you may occasionally mix in a real-world personal anecdote somewhere in the AI’s text to give it a more realistic feel. But the units of thought primarily populating the page are not yours. They are the derivative “thoughts” (outputs) of Anthropic, OpenAI, or whatever other private or open source AI model group that trained the model you’re using with their selection of inputs.

“I don’t know why this is relevant,” Druckenmiller said later in his response to the AI kerfuffle. “My name is on the piece. It’s my message.”

Some of this confusion may be rooted in those who have learned a second language. Beginners are often encouraged to use the Lexical Approach, also known as chunking, to quickly learn established phrases in one’s target language that can then be used to speed the path toward language fluency and, eventually, novel sentences. So, for a CEO or finance expert, who is either too busy or simply uninterested in learning to write their own nuanced human thoughts on a topic, but still wants to be a part of the public discourse, the logic leap of “using AI to write is just chunking together my original thoughts” is understandable. But while chunking your way through French-language learning will help you on a brief trip to Paris, it will fail you when you meet a fluent French speaker who wants to discuss the finer points of the European Union’s AI Act.

There is no substitute for thinking when you encounter another thinking human.

Someday soon, your wearable AI assistant will indeed whisper the correct response to you when you are met with a person presenting you with new input you don’t quite understand or are not versed in. But that will not be you doing the thinking, it will still be an algorithm giving you its best guess.

The Human Thoughtcrimes AI Wants to Extinguish

Contrary to what some, like Druckenmiller, think, AI is not merely an advanced kind of word processor. In the realm of writing (that is, transmitting your unique units of thought), it is far more similar to a sophisticated copier machine engaging in a Markov chain-like stochastic process. The AI doesn’t actually “know” anything, it is just stringing things together that seem like they belong together. Probabilistic outputs are the antithesis of calculator outputs. Your AI prompting “genius” is mostly just you shaking the Magic 8 Ball, producing a different stochastic result each time. There is little intentionality. That comes from humans (for now).

So what happens when prominent people, who are extremely intelligent and experienced in their area of focus, offload their actual thinking to AI? Today, what you are getting is what George Orwell, in his dystopian fiction novel 1984 (published in 1949), called Newspeak. Loosely, Newspeak was a new form of writing developed to compel the public to adhere to pre-approved modalities of thinking and argumentation, linguistically caging the thoughts of most citizens into a general average of what the governing authorities deemed acceptable.

And while opting not to use AI is not considered what Orwell called a Thoughtcrime, increasingly, the notion of leaving AI on the sidelines and writing your own human thoughts is being framed as inefficient, and largely unnecessary. Why can’t you just let AI output your general thinking and then season it with a few of your own personal touches? is what I’m hearing from some, including a few major newsrooms. I have no issue with using AI to copyedit text you’ve written, assuming you focus on keeping your wonderfully flawed writing voice intact. But words are our thoughts made whole into units of distinct verbiage. Words are not inconveniences. Words are living things that communicate to move humanity.

However, we are all now so time-crunched that it has become common to stop paying close attention. So let me remind you of the “thoughtcrimes” you are currently not allowed to engage in on the most popular AI chatbot platforms:

I am happy to see some of these restrictions, but depending on which country or state you live in, the definition of these prohibited topics may shift dramatically. And these are just the “listed” topics. An AI company can choose to obfuscate or completely omit the discussion of anything it wants to, even if that output option in the model might serve general truth.

When you use AI to construct your thinking, you are by default adhering to the rules of someone else’s mind palace (or “brain attic,” as Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called it). And if you want to break ground on fresh ideas, some of which may be considered dangerously unorthodox by the makers of the AI model you’re using, you could be in for a nasty, restrictive surprise.

Or, you could just accept the intellectual fence, and let the AI do, well, whatever it can do—which is the statistical average. If you do use AI to write, instead of waiting for someone to question how your thoughts were composed, like Druckenmiller, the best move is transparency up front. I implore you, tell your readers that they’re getting AI-generated text. Let the public decide if they want to spend their time on Earth reading Newspeak. Or if they’d rather read human writers who take the time to yell out into the void, unhindered by the ideological guardrails of an algorithm’s masters who have their own interests baked into the product many think they’re using independently as an unbiased, neutral tool. ✍︎

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🎭 Robin Williams’ Instagram vs. AI

The children of actor Robin Williams (Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, Bicentennial Man) have decided to reactivate his Instagram account with one singular purpose in mind: serving as an online authenticity checker when AI deepfakes of their father pop up online.

“As we recognize what would be our Dad’s 75th year, we’re grateful to see new generations discovering his work while longtime fans continue to celebrate the joy he brought into their lives. As technology evolves, we want this to be a safe, trusted place where the stories, photos, videos, and memories shared reflect his legacy with authenticity, warmth, and care,” reads the message from Zak, Zelda, & Cody Williams on Robin Williams’ Instagram account. “This is our way of sharing his unique talent and humor with the world, including the moments that made us and so many of you laugh, as we remember our Dad’s extraordinary life and work. He continues to inspire us and delight people all over the world.”

Zelda Williams first expressed her distaste for the numerous AI deepfakes of her father appearing online when she posted a message on her personal Instagram account in 2025 in response to the now-defunct Sora app creations from users. “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t,” wrote Zelda. “To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to ‘this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that’s enough’, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”

Social Proof vs. AI: The big question is: Will this approach work? Is establishing a social media account where people can check the authenticity of a new viral video or image of a celebrity or public figure enough to push back against potentially damaging or simply inaccurate AI-produced replications of a person’s face, video, or audio? We’re still in mostly unexplored territory, and even the newest laws, like the Take It Down Act, generally only address deepfake porn or advertising disclosures. (The No Fake Act has still not been passed into law.)

Therefore, in these early days, as AI laws are still evolving, I think that the Williams family approach might actually be one of the best techniques for addressing online AI fakes. Yes, it adds work and maintenance to your plate, especially if you’re not fond of social media noise, but at this point, it may be a necessary evil until AI laws catch up to the speed of social media clout chasing.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

💪 Fitness Influencer’s Book Hit With AI Accusation, But There’s a Catch

1. Lately, the most popular witch hunt is tracking down books that appear to be AI-generated, and now there’s a new target: The Aesthetic Revolution: Embracing Vanity and the Future of Fitness to Unlock Your Healthiest Self, by professional bodybuilder Mike Israetel, who holds a PhD in sport physiology. The 304-page book was published in June by Grand Central, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group, the second-largest trade publisher globally. The AI accusation comes from Australian YouTuber Solomon Nelson, a self-described natural bodybuilder who posted a surgical, nearly 2-hour-long video dissection of the book on his channel with over 104,000 subscribers.

After going through the book’s topics, chapter by chapter, he then explains the areas he believes to be AI-generated, with fairly convincing arguments. This is the second notable AI accusation Hachette’s authors have faced this year. Back in March, a Hachette book titled Shy Girl, by Mia Ballard, was canceled after a YouTube book reviewer pointed out a number of areas where AI-generated text seemed, according to the reviewer, to have been used in the book.

“If the cancellation of Shy Girl is Hachette’s operational standard for dealing with generative AI, then Hachette’s path forward regarding Mike Israetel’s book is clear,” said Nelson during his video breakdown.

“By any objective metric, the evidence of AI use in The Aesthetic Revolution is far more conspicuous and undeniable than the text-based allegations that brought down Shy Girl. To maintain editorial integrity and consistency, Hachette must apply the same standard to The Aesthetic Revolution. Otherwise, this would signal a double standard. It would prove that Hachette is willing to police AI slop among fiction authors, but turns a blind eye when a prominent fitness influencer cuts the same corners with non-fiction. For Hachette Book Group, the burden of proof has been met. Based on their own track record, the only consistent response is to pull The Aesthetic Revolution from publication.”

Disclosure As AI Accusation Antidote: The only reason I found out about this critique of Israetel’s book is that, at various times in my life, I’ve been an amateur non-competing bodybuilder. So I occasionally peek in and see what the latest developments are in the space. I’ve never used steroids, but I understand why some people do. I also understand how attitudes have softened on the topic over the years. Some believe that using steroids is cheating, no matter what. Others believe that steroids are fine, as long as you disclose steroid use before offering the public training advice or presenting yourself as a natural bodybuilder. I’m beginning to see generative AI in the same way.

Yes, I still believe that the makers of most commercial AI models obtained data from humans who created original work, and those humans deserve compensation in some form. However, now that the AI genie is out of the bottle, and people are using it to write books, produce music, and create images and videos, I think the notion that AI will suddenly vanish due to some moral, creative purist, or even legal influence is not realistic. Since AI in the creative arts business isn’t going away, I think the most realistic path forward is to simply demand disclosure regarding when AI has been used. If the audience is informed that AI was used, and still wants to consume that product, then they have some agency and haven’t been deceived.

The problem with a creator using AI and not disclosing it is (at minimum) twofold: 1. A publisher needs to know what it’s attempting to assert copyright over, and 2. The audience deserves to know what they’re actually paying for with their dollars or attention. Similarly, if a bodybuilder like Israetel is on YouTube giving his 3.89 million subscribers workout tips, it’s important that his viewers know that he used steroids to aid his physical appearance. To his credit, Israetel has indeed publicly acknowledged his steroid use.

Fittingly, his approach is consistent when it comes to generative AI. Several months ago, before his book was even published, he posted a message on social media outlining his AI use in his then-upcoming book.

“I 100% used AI to help me smooth over some of the prose for my upcoming book, The Aesthetic Revolution. This was before a whole team of editors from the publishing company further smoothed the prose over. They were made aware of this,” wrote Israetel in May. “I’m stating this now, well before the book comes out, so that there is no controversy if and when someone detects that it has elements of AI writing styles in it. I will also be using AI in the future unapologetically to improve my work in various ways.”

As for how U.S. copyright laws will handle this kind of assertion of authorship related to copyright, the U.S. Copyright Office made its position clear back in 2025: “Where a human inputs their own copyrightable work and that work is perceptible in the output, they will be the author of at least that portion of the output. Their own creative expression will be protected by copyright, with a scope analogous to that in a derivative work. Just as derivative work protection is limited to the material added by the later author, copyright in this type of AI-generated output would cover the perceptible human expression. It may also cover the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the human-authored and AI-generated material, even though it would not extend to the AI-generated elements standing alone.”

How major publishers like Hachette will handle this tricky new copyright territory when eventually forced to defend it in the future remains to be seen. During the Ballard incident, the publisher told The New York Times, “Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling.” Hachette hasn’t commented publicly on Israetel’s AI use, so it could be that the only difference in the two situations was, again, full disclosure before publication. At the very least, until we have more major cases testing the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidelines, I think disclosure is where things must start with these kinds of AI-assisted or AI-generated books.

🎭 Tyler Durden Vs. AI

2. “There’s a lot of pushback against AI, but AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, forty- to ninety-million-dollar budgeted films, get made… I heard an AI song the other day that was pretty damn good. But it had a repetitive nature to it. It’s not going to be the same as hearing her voice—a woman’s voice, a person’s voice. I saw a show the other week in Paris. I saw Flea and Thom Yorke get up onstage, and they did Marvin Gaye. With Flea’s jazz band. Ohhh, it was off the charts, full of joy. AI can’t do that.”
—Brad Pitt, actor, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Fight Club
*Source: Esquire

🤖 Anthropic’s Plan: Drown Human Work in Watermarks

3. This last bit is more of a warning than anything, and it has to do with Anthropic’s new plan to watermark its Claude output as a way to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content. Specifically, Anthropic says, “Claude models launched in the EU on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch. Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported.” Sounds good, right? Now, everyone in the EU will know when they’re getting AI outputs rather than directly human-created text or code.

But there’s a problem. The watermarking will not just be affixed to AI-generated text, it will also be attached to any outputs that pass through Claude. That means that if you wrote an original story, with zero AI text, but sent it through Claude for editing and then used that text, your human-created text could be incorrectly watermarked as the fruit of the AI model. Here’s Anthropic’s way of parsing this potentially confusing watermarking approach:

“A detected mark provides a signal that content was processed by Claude, but is not fully conclusive. Detecting a Claude mark tells you that the content may have been processed by Claude. It does not, on its own, confirm the full provenance of the content. For example: Claude may not be the original author. People often use Claude to proofread, translate, summarize, or convert files. The output can carry a Claude mark even if the underlying ideas, text, or data originated from another source.”

Why This Is So Dangerous: I have generally had a positive view of Anthropic’s approach toward human-AI policies. So I’ll admit that I tend to assume they’re usually trying to do the right thing (as much as is possible in a space foundationally based on the unpaid use of prior copyrighted human work). But Anthropic’s watermarking approach has me wondering if this might be, in some way, passive-aggressively deliberate.

The idea of signal dilution through saturation is common in the military, particularly when sending drones out into the battle theater along with chaff (millions of tiny aluminum-coated fibers) to confuse the enemy’s radar tracking systems. Anthropic’s scattershot watermarking method reminds me of this military crypsis-through-commonality strategy. The fact that detecting what is and isn’t AI has become the obsession of many, particularly in fields where writing is a central tool (the courts, journalism, Hollywood), isn’t helping AI companies that are trying to normalize using AI-generated text.

So what can these AI companies do? Well, one solution would be to figure out a way to, through a kind of cultural semiotic collapse, nudge the culture toward no longer even caring whether something was generated by AI or not. Consumer behavior can make or break a company’s bottom line. If human-written text edited by Claude is confoundingly and repeatedly mistaken for Anthropic’s AI-generated text outputs, eventually, the public might stop caring, and as a result, Claude use may inexorably increase. That’s not an accidental policy drift. That’s just good business. (Yes, those last two sentences are me deliberately mimicking AI-style outputs.)

Of course, the only real solution to this quandary is to never put your work into Claude. And if you do, then you certainly shouldn’t subsequently copy that edited work into external documents. But that kind of discipline, in a world where a 1-minute-30-second social media clip is often considered a long, boring documentary, may be asking too much of many users. ✍︎

MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

The 8,000-Hour Freakout

The YouTube creator community is having a collective mental breakdown following the platform’s announcement of stricter new hurdles necessary to enter its YouTube Partner Program (YPP). For those who have been keeping track, the YPP allows YouTube creators to have their videos monetized and earn AdSense revenue from their content. The reason for the group freakout this week is the new, rather high hurdles, which went from needing 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 qualified watch hours in the last 365 days to 1,000 subscribers and 8,000 qualified watch hours in the last 365 days or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the past 90 days.

For a YouTube channel with tons of viral content, hitting that 4,000 qualified watch hours milestone was trivial, but for most YouTubers, hitting that mark has historically been a long grind that many take years to finally achieve. By doubling that hurdle, YouTube isn’t telling its community that it no longer wants amateur content. It’s simply turning up the filter to reward even more professional and polished content with dedicated audiences. Kick and Twitch can have the influencers doing profanity-laden stunt streams from their bedrooms or out on the streets with Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses. YouTube is trying to level up and lock in premium advertisers and the viewers they’re trying to reach.

The deadline for the change is February 1, 2027, which has sparked a lot of chatter that YouTube will be awash in new, mostly low-quality content in the next six months as many attempt to achieve the old YPP mark before the new rules kick in. Others are openly throwing up their hands and giving up on YPP altogether, assuming the 8,000 qualified hours mark will be a Sisyphean effort that burns out most YouTubers along the way.

🤖 The AI Slop Myth

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the opinions of YouTubers over the past couple of days. And there seems to be one prevailing opinion that I believe is directionally incorrect: that YouTube is doing this to weed out AI slop on the platform. YouTube recently further outlined its methodology for reducing AI slop on the platform. On the contrary, I think this will lead to even more YouTubers who are only interested in money rather than creativity or education to redouble their efforts to game the system with even more sophisticated AI video slop efforts. Whether YouTube’s algorithm can catch it all, or even most of it, will be proven in the next 24 months.

But back to the YPP and its stricter guidelines. I searched for clues that YouTube might have tipped its hand at this major change during Alphabet’s last earnings report in July. I found nothing. And while YouTube did announce a slate of creator-led shows it packaged for advertisers back in May, that’s more about the platform handpicking stars rather than a platform-wide strategy applied to all users. But the hint that the YPP change was coming that I did find was in a totally unrelated update weeks before Alphabet’s earnings report, buried on the official YouTube Creators channel. In short, on July 9, YouTube announced that it was rolling out its Shows feature to more YouTube creators.

🔍 The Buried Clue

The feature, which was announced in 2024 and only began trickling out to some creators in 2025, allows YouTubers to turn playlists into slick TV show-style presentations with dedicated show pages on YouTube. Additionally, the show feature allows the creator to create TV show branding graphics, season and episode numbers, and a made-for-TV framing that suddenly makes a video series a lot more bingeable. Likewise, the show is then added to YouTube’s “Recommended shows” and “Continue watching” menu options, which mirror the options you’d see on professional TV-centric streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

📺 The Velvet Rope

The catch? In order to use the Shows feature, you must be enrolled in the YPP. And there it is. That’s the real reason YouTube raised the barriers for entering YPP. It has nothing to do with being stingy about sharing AdSense dollars with smaller YouTubers. It’s about YouTube’s long game. YouTube already competes with other major streaming platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Paramount+, etc.) in the hunt for advertising dollars and viewer attention. This new Shows feature is a move toward further professionalizing YouTube’s vast collection of amateur-created content so that it more seamlessly lives next to the studio-produced content already present on the platform.

YouTube can’t simply tell its millions of amateur video creators to “do better” or “look better.” The platform has to incentivize moving independent creators to more professional, consistent, and viewer-retention-centric presentations that don’t involve cheap clickbait thumbnails and false flag titles. The Shows feature was the signal that YouTube was further prioritizing professional video channels from independent creators. The higher barriers to YPP entry just mean that the club is now only for the most serious and dedicated YouTubers, not just for those gaming the platform in pursuit of cheap AdSense dollars.

This is how YouTube moves from merely competing on viewer numbers and begins to more directly compete on the overall quality of experience. If you’re already in YPP, the new change won’t boot you out, and you’ll be fine (as long as you maintain 1,000 watch hours a year, 1 million Shorts views in 90 days, or post two long-form videos or five Shorts every 90 days). But if you’re trying to get into YPP, and video creation is just your occasional hobby and not your aspirational profession, this new change will probably organically weed you out of the potential YPP pool, which is exactly what YouTube wants. ✍︎

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📖 Throwing the Book at Authors Using AI?

1. The latest author to have their book publishing deal scrapped due to accusations of AI use is Nigerian author Jerry Adedayo Falade. His book, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, sparked a bidding war among publishers that reportedly garnered offers from six figures all the way up to $2 million for the book to be published in 2028 by Minotaur/The St. Martin’s Publishing Group/Macmillan Publishers. The deal was to include a follow-up book as well. That all fell apart when Falade’s book agents, Marc Gerald of Europa Content in the U.S. and Sandy Hodgman of Hodgman Literary, dropped the writer over concerns about how the book was produced.

“[The author] produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion. During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with [the author] for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilizing AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process,” reads a statement obtained by Deadline back in July. “We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book. This raises so many questions about authorship and what AI means for this industry but those are questions for another day. We regret that our enthusiasm led to this outcome and we apologize to our publishing partners.”

Since then, Falade has denied using AI to write the book but confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he used an open source AI tool for research details “and not for writing the book itself.” Taking his thoughts to Instagram, Falade wrote, in part: “I don’t drink or smoke. Writing has always been my escape route since 2017. Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body is my work.”

This Will Happen Again: I’ve been following most of the AI book publishing stories as they’ve unfolded in real time. And while I’m very much of the belief that there are occasional racial as well as class biases in U.S. book publishing, I don’t think this and a few other AI-related incidents are about targeting a particular ethnic group, as Falade indicated in a statement to The Guardian. The most recent example I would point to is Steven Rosenbaum, who is not black, and who quickly had high-profile speaking gigs canceled after a New York Times article exposed his book as being laced with AI outputs and AI-generated mistakes.

Rather than a bias against a particular group, I think what is actually happening here is a bias against AI. Some of that anti-AI sentiment is cultural, with the thinking being that a human should be the sole author of a book with their name on it. However, some of the anti-AI stances are coming from a legal perspective. The U.S. Copyright Office has already made its stance clear that AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted, which puts any book publisher looking to exploit the rights of a book for film or TV adaptation in peril.

But since we have yet to produce an AI detector that can stand up to legal scrutiny in court, right now readers, publishers, and agents are operating on a combination of experiential analysis (“does this read like AI”), trust in the creator, and an overall honor system. There is no AI detector that can render undeniable proof of AI-generated text. These tools can still only offer clues, which are sometimes wrong, depending on which AI detector you use.

However, I believe this entire debate will soon fade into the rearview mirror of publishing history for two reasons. First, AI is constantly evolving and getting better. At some point, probably soon, it will be impossible for anyone, whether an experienced editor or even an AI detector, to catch any sign of AI-generated text. So what we’re experiencing now is kind of a delusional honeymoon that ignores the rapid trajectory of AI models.

The second reason has to do with the audience: Increasingly, I’m beginning to wonder if readers care or not. Although I’m conversant in a number of AI tools, as a lifelong pre-AI creator in visual art, books, journalism, and film, I still prefer to get my art from humans who actually are good at more than just prompting and affixing their names to the outputs, even if done very creatively. So the prospect that audiences might soon not care about AI versus human-created art isn’t something I welcome, but it’s a reality I’ve come to grips with as possibly occurring in the near future. Gen Z seems pretty AI-averse today. But trends and minds change quickly, nothing is static.

AI & Race: As for the claim from the author that a particular group of authors is being targeted due to their ethnicity regarding AI claims in book publishing, absent a thorough investigation, I haven’t seen enough data to support such a claim. But I can say that I met with Falade’s former book agent, Gerald, many years ago in New York City. At the time, he was engaged in republishing older black pulp fiction novels as well as developing newer black writers focused on genre fiction.

I don’t know what Gerald is up to today beyond this new story. And I do not profess to know what his general ethical posture or business practices are in 2026. But of all the people in book publishing to accuse of having a race-based bias against black authors and their ability to produce excellent work without the aid of AI, I’d have a difficult time casting Gerald in that particular light, given what I witnessed from him many years ago. If new information is uncovered, I’m more than willing to change my opinion on the matter.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

Last year’s $1 billion deal between Disney and OpenAI that would have added Sora AI-generated Disney characters to the Disney Plus app was quietly killed as Sam Altman decided to refocus on enterprise customers rather than mainstream consumers. In the wake of that surprise turn, many wondered what would happen to Disney’s plans for the Disney Plus app without Sora, and now we know. Disney has just launched a new deal with TikTok that will allow users who opt into the program to also push their viral videos featuring select Disney characters to the Disney Plus app.

And just to make sure hardcore Disney fans don’t feel any disturbance in The Force due to potential incoming TikTok viral slop, Disney is framing the arrangement as “thoughtfully curated Disney-centric fan-created content.” That content will live in the Verts section of the app, which is geared more toward mobile users interested in short videos rather than viewers sitting back watching the Disney Plus app on their big-screen TVs.

“The best storytellers are fans first,” Asad Ayaz, Disney’s chief marketing and brand officer, said in a statement. “This collaboration creates a new bridge between the stories we tell and the creativity they inspire, giving creators a bigger stage to share what they’ve made, and audiences more to discover on Disney Plus every day.”

What this deal highlights is that Disney’s interest in the OpenAI Sora deal was always primarily about viral videos that use Disney characters and only secondarily focused on the AI aspect of the app. When Sora 2 launched in 2025, the app was immediately flooded with AI-generated videos featuring some of the most famous characters from film and television.

Of course, those videos violated the IP rights of a handful of major studios, so the ability to generate those characters was soon disabled. But the formula seemed to point to something interesting—a new way to garner audience attention. For Disney, the apparent conceit of the failed OpenAI deal was: Maybe if users had the legal right to use Disney characters on the Sora AI app, we could benefit from the virality while also owning (via the $1 billion investment) a part of the platform using our IP.

The new TikTok deal with Disney doesn’t contain any of the AI components mentioned in the OpenAI/Sora deal, but make no mistake, AI is still lurking in the background. Although the new U.S. arm of TikTok (aka TikTok U.S. Data Security Joint Venture LLC) is majority-owned by U.S. companies, including Oracle, this deal appears to fall under the umbrella of the Chinese arm of TikTok (aka Douyin in China), which is owned by ByteDance.

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“Together with Disney, we’re bringing the authentic creator expression of the TikTok community to Disney Plus, inviting audiences to experience the shared creativity that makes fandom so powerful,” said TikTok’s global head of entertainment, Dawn Yang, who joined the ByteDance-owned company back in 2020.

And in case you haven’t been keeping up, ByteDance also owns one of the most popular and powerful AI video models on the market called Seedance. Earlier this year, Seedance 2.0 users unleashed a flurry of hyper-realistic AI videos featuring well-known movie and TV stars until Hollywood studios shut them down via legal threats aimed at ByteDance. Now that Disney is officially in bed with TikTok, it seems only a matter of time before the two companies introduce Seedance 2.5-powered fan-created AI videos, featuring approved Disney characters, for the Disney Plus app.

Depending on how this goes, we might see this kind of studio-meets-AI-app deal become the norm as major studios look to hook more eyeballs and subscribers by any means necessary. For now, the Disney/TikTok deal is only for U.S. users, but the companies have confirmed that the partnership will roll out to Disney Plus app users in other countries soon. ✍︎

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🤖 ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 Is Terrifyingly Realistic

1. Although U.S. AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are grabbing all the tech headlines, China’s ByteDance has been quietly building what appears to be the best AI video tool currently available. Hollywood received a warning shot showing just how powerful ByteDance’s AI video was earlier this year with the launch of Seedance 2.0, which produced realistic versions of movie scenes featuring some of cinema’s biggest stars. Access to such infringing outputs was quickly nerfed, but the message was clear: Seedance 2.0 was best in class. This week, the company has released Seedance 2.5, and, somewhat shockingly, it looks even better than the previous version. The humans appear more realistic, and the dialogue flows more naturally from the lips of the simulated live-action characters.

Additionally, users can now generate 30 seconds of footage, effectively doubling what was possible in the previous version. The 2.5 version has also added Long Video Mode, which helps the user maintain video character and background consistency for up to three minutes per clip, a powerful tool for anyone attempting to make movies using Seedance. And for traditional VFX experts, 2.5 includes Dreamina AI plugins for Maya and Blender.

China Winning the AI Video War: Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium, Chappie) recently showed off what he was able to accomplish with Seedance 2.0 via his trailer for Nightborne, a sci-fi horror short. And while the video currently has nearly equal Likes (9k) and Dislikes (8.4k) on YouTube, the short displayed how, in the hands of a traditional filmmaking professional, Seedance 2.0 is powerful. With the arrival of the much-improved Seedance 2.5, we’ll likely see more traditional directors begin to experiment with AI video in the coming months, despite the still simmering cultural backlash against it as old school auteurs like Christopher Nolan win the box office.

AI Star Power Without the Stars: I also noticed something interesting about the two Seedance 2.5 demo videos posted by ByteDance this week. The new videos deftly avoid image rights violations by featuring synthetic human characters that “almost” look like some of your favorite actors. In one case, the star of the AI video is a character that looks a lot like a mix of Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) and Matt Smith (Doctor Who, House of the Dragon). Which leads me to a new prediction. In the same way that grocery giants like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have built empires on store brands that mimic your favorite commercial food brands, I suspect that we’re about to see an AI video-powered wave of familiar faces in AI videos.

These “generic brand” amalgam faces will slickly blend the images of Scarlett Johansson and Charlize Theron, for example, to give you a Hollywood blonde actress archetype that feels incredibly familiar (and thus trusted by viewers), but potentially falls just short of violating the image rights of those actresses. I’m not sure even SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, will be able to effectively combat AI avatars that sorta, kinda, maybe could be, just might look vaguely like what two of your favorite actors’ baby would look like if you gave them a role in a new movie.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

✍️ Substack Gives the AI Power to the People

1. Substack has taken an amazingly bold step by entering into a partnership with AI detection company Pangram to allow Substack readers to easily detect if a Substack post or comment was written with AI assistance or by a human. Substack CEO Chris Best is careful to point out that the platform isn’t prohibiting AI-generated or AI-assisted text, rather, they’re giving readers a choice to decide what they want to read.

“The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing,” wrote Best on the official Substack updates page. “When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.”

My Confession: I actually conducted a small investigation last year to see if AI-generated text had infiltrated Substack. My findings were startling. I didn’t just find massive use of AI-generated Substacks, I found that some of the most prominent, trusted Substacks (specifically in the categories of business and tech, where I focused my research) that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers are pumping out AI-generated newsletters without disclosing this to readers. My confession is that I wrote the piece, but I decided not to publish it. In it I outed a handful of prominent Substackers for undisclosed AI-generated text (in some cases, up to 80% of the text was AI).

My decision rested on two reasons: 1. Although I personally find AI detection tools to be quite accurate after several years of testing them, their results will currently not stand up in a court of law. So if you use AI detection tools to make such a claim against a writer, you’re on shaky legal ground, unless the writer admits it. 2. Frankly, some of the writers I caught are so popular, I knew I’d make a lot of unwanted enemies, including from the ranks of the readers of some of these Substacks. Additionally, last year, it was unclear to me just how much readers did or did not care whether what they’re reading is AI-generated or not.

Today, I’m more certain than I was in 2025 that a large cohort of readers want to be informed that they’re reading AI. But now that Substack is providing AI text detection as a default, the results of my investigation are no longer necessary. Anyone who cares can easily check their favorite Substack author. Will this result in some losing paid subscribers? Maybe, maybe not. This metric may very well answer the question as to whether readers care about getting their text from machines or their fellow humans.

🤖 Can AI Replace Andy Serkis’s Gollum?

2. “There are elements of the character that could work, but at the end of day we’re talking about storytelling, and storytelling and drama is what happens between actors, and performance capture, obviously, is an actor’s authored technology. So I don’t think you’ll be able to replace performance… not as yet. For small prompted moments, I think it stands up. But the whole notion of a script, from A to Z, page one to 120 and the minutiae of actors’ decisions that author their characters, I don’t believe that that could be completely replaced.”
—Andy Serkis, actor/director, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
*Source: Variety

🎬 Aronofsky’s $15 million AI Movie Dream Injection

3. When acclaimed film director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain) launched his Primordial Soup AI filmmaking studio last year, reactions in Hollywood were muted. We had yet to see the wonders of ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and its next-level realistic AI video footage. And his first AI outing, On This Day... 1776, for Time Magazine, was ripped by some as not worthy of the director’s past pedigree. Despite that, some are optimistic about his efforts because his fledgling AI studio just landed $15 million in new funding. The injection of cash was revealed via a Securities and Exchange Commission filing uncovered by Variety this week.

Important Context: The reception for Hollywood director Neill Blomkamp’s (District 9, Elysium, Chappie) AI horror short Nightborne has been largely negative, that is, if you focus on the tech press and social media. Many viewers immediately branded it “AI slop.” But the truth is a little more complicated. Since the video launched, it has racked up 205,000 views, with most of the comments on the video leaning negative. But when you check the Likes vs. Dislikes on the video, they are evenly split, 7,160 Likes vs. 7,211 Dislikes. Compared to previous high-profile AI videos I’ve reviewed, this is the most favorable reaction metric I’ve seen.

It seems to be a hint that Blomkamp has hit closest to the mark of what mainstream audiences might accept in the way of AI-generated movies. Regardless of Aronofsky’s rough AI video start, he’s yet another credentialed Hollywood director aiming to replicate the more even reception Blomkamp is currently experiencing among film fans.

📖 Dave Eggers on AI at OpenAI meeting

4. “The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in . . .  If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.”
—Dave Eggers, author, The Circle, in a private meeting with OpenAI staff
*Source: The Financial Times

MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

📺 Netflix’s AI House of Cards

1. I’ve been tracking Netflix’s internal experiments involving the use of AI for film and TV for over a year, and this week the company provided the evidence we need to call it the leading AI filmed content studio in Hollywood. During the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call this week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed just how many projects the streamer has used AI to enhance.

“Gen-AI workflows now have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration to date on post-production. We’re leveraging Gen-AI for really complicated shots and sequences,” said Sarandos on the call. “[AI was used on] things like enhancing crowds or historical battle scenes. Keep in mind that in many of the cases, productions would have left out those key shots because they just wouldn’t have been able to afford them. They wouldn’t have been able to do them in the timeframes that they’re working on. Those sequences are saved by the availability and access to these Gen-AI tools.”

Despite the now wide use of AI at Netflix, primarily through its internal team, Eyeline, and the newly acquired Ben Affleck startup, Interpositive, Sarandos was careful to highlight the ongoing importance of human craft. “We believe it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that,” said Sarandos. “AI will give creatives better tools to bring their visions to life. Movies are being made by people who make movies. AI provides them with better tools to make them even better. Today, our talent leverages [AI] tools for things like set references, previs [pre-visualization], VFX, and sequence prep and shot planning. It all makes the production itself so much more smooth and efficient, and fast.”

The streaming boss also noted Netflix’s The American Experiment documentary series for using 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage. “The cost savings [of using AI] will likely be reinvested into more content on the service, which fuels high-quality engagement and that whole kind of revenue profit flywheel that’s going to come from that we’ve been talking about from day one,” Sarandos said.

Hollywood’s AI Green Light: Amid a lot of anti-AI discourse from actors and directors alike in Hollywood, the truth is that the industry has been waiting for one of the big players to normalize AI use in film and TV, and Netflix just did exactly that. And while there’s been a creeping move by some to politicize generative AI as a right-wing-adjacent tool of the tech broligarchy, Netflix’s strong left-leaning cultural track record mostly shields it from any easy connection to such negative framing. As a result, this revelation (300 titles using AI!) may very well be the green light Hollywood has been waiting for to go all in on AI filmmaking.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

As the public continues to sour on AI in all forms—AI videos, AI-generated text, and the creeping impacts of AI displacement on the job market—the leaders of the AI space are realizing that AI needs some serious rebranding. Take Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot. The company’s newest marketing push is all about the fear of AI.

To bring the point home, Anthropic posted a one-minute, thirty-second video that begins with a literal house on fire in the middle of a black void, reminiscent of a scene from The Road. Then we’re flashed images of a child reading a computer screen in the dark. Then, a bleak scene of what looks like a group of manual laborers in a Mad Max-esque pit mine. Then, the screen goes black, and a grainy voice says, “Can AI be trusted?” This is followed by screen grabs of surveillance video, followed by, literally, a massive graveyard, as another voice says, “Who’s gonna hit the brakes?”

Are you terrified yet?

Good. That’s the idea.

The video goes on to display a few more troubling images along with audio of the concerns many people have about AI. Then the turn happens (as Michael Caine’s character calls it in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige). At the 50-second mark, suddenly, all the comments about AI in the video turn hopeful. “Could AI help people stop feeling misunderstood?” a voice says over still images of happy people. “Could AI help me build more connections in the community?” another voice ponders, as the image of a smiling elderly woman moves across the screen. And with that, the doom loop is closed. What was once AI dread is transformed into tech optimism.

Artificial Empathy: How the AI Marketing Magic Is Made

This marketing alchemy was provided by Mother, a UK-based advertising agency experienced in the art of brand crisis management. In 2018, the agency reframed KFC’s product catastrophe as a self-effacing admission of a massive screw-up. The “FCK” campaign not only helped explain away supply chain issues, it also made the fast food chain seem a little edgy, and possibly more relatable.

Likewise, Anthropic’s Mother-produced “flaw admission” ad is also a masterclass in reverse psychology. American social psychologist Elliot Aronson called it the Pratfall Effect in his 1966 paper describing how highly competent people or organizations can be viewed as more likable when making or admitting mistakes, either accidentally or deliberately. So, it’s clear that someone finally got to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei with a bit of marketing advice. Now, instead of Amodei simply doing dozens of hand-wringing interviews about how AI could make most of humanity jobless, just before bringing about the AI singularity apocalypse, Anthropic can be reframed as the solution, rather than the problem.

The video advertisement is buttressed by a new “hard questions” Anthropic website, featuring Kamille the tattoo artist, Sarah the high school teacher, and Scott the manufacturing manager, all sharing their thoughts on AI. You see? Anthropic is listening to you. This is a virtual version of what politicians usually call “a listening tour,” where the political figure works to get public support in a show of hearing out random members of the general public. It’s usually very cheap and quite effective, despite being seen by critics as obvious public relations efforts rather than meaningful outreach.

Of course, as former UK prime minister Gordon Brown found out, such listening tours with the real public can backfire, particularly if the politician happens upon a clever or unruly member of the public. But in Anthropic’s case, the audio clips are curated and designed to let you hear what the company wants you to hear, not necessarily the most critical voices from the public.

Trust Me. I Mean, Trust My AI. I Mean, Just Trust…

Toward the end of Anthropic’s anti-AI doom advertisement, a voice asks, “Can AI help me be a better teacher, better mom?”

I think a better question would be: Would someone have seriously asked 2004 pre-IPO Google, “Can Google help me be a better human being?”

It’s not that the question is absurd in and of itself. It’s the nagging habit of AI companies (and their fans) anthropomorphizing AI as if it were already a living entity with discrete and novel “thoughts” about human existence. The library can help people. The 2004-era Google (which became an optimized form of the library) could help you. But neither the library nor Google of old should be leaned on as sage confidantes trusted to guide the fate of your life. Furthermore, the library and Google never hallucinated, as AI still does. So, yes, AI can help you be a better mom, just as the library or classic-era Google could. But it isn’t a conscious consigliere slow-dripping the elixir of wisdom into your ear.

The reason I keep referencing the 2004 version of Google is that that is when its internal ethos of “Don’t Be Evil” was publicly popularized. The statement was the clue. A library can’t be “evil,” it just delivers information. Assigning any intent to Google, good or evil, was a clue that information on the platform would be, to some extent, controlled and delivered by the powerful hands of human engineers who do have the capacity to be “evil.” YouTubers who run afoul of the Google/Alphabet-owned video platform’s speech guidelines find this out daily.

Google largely ditched the “Don’t Be Evil” motto in 2018. But I reference that old dictum to point out something about the marketing of AI in 2026. The public should not allow any AI company to abdicate its responsibility regarding AI by increasingly framing AI as some sort of separate entity that has any capacity to cogitate alongside humans. That day may be coming, but it’s not (as far as we know) here yet.

So when Anthropic posts audio in its advertisement that asks, “Can AI help me be a better mom?” the message the company is actually transmitting is that “Anthropic/Claude” might make you a better mom. That difference is important, because when the entity you’re trusting to help you become a better mom isn’t an amorphous “AI,” but rather a group of humans with their own backgrounds and political and social biases, the “can you make me better” becomes weighted with a lot more responsibility.

Anthropic’s AI is not “an entity,” it is a computer tool influenced by the humans who work there.

What we’re witnessing here is generational sleight of hand. “It’s not Anthropic guiding you, it’s the [presto chango] ‘AI’ guiding you.” The prestidigitation is impressive, because many people are buying it.

The last on-screen message in Anthropic’s ad reads, “There’s hope in hard questions.” My compliments to the advertising agency chef. This is possibly one of the best marketing lines in the history of technology. I mean that with zero snark. It’s brilliant.

But amid all of the humanizing imagery of the Anthropic commercial, there’s really only one hard question that comes to my mind: If AI does somehow cause widespread harm in the future, will Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies take full responsibility and make amends, or just blame it on, oops, the AI? ✍︎

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📸 Hollywood Versus Mark Zuckerberg & Instagram

1. Mark Zuckerberg seems intent on using AI to transform every aspect of his business, including what many view as the last good thing about Meta, which is Instagram. The company just rolled out Muse Image, a new AI image generation tool that allows anyone to create new images based on images currently posted on Instagram. This includes celebrities and public figures, many of whom thought they were just using the service to share personal pictures with their followers. Predictably, the feature isn’t something users turn on and opt into. No, this is automatically on for all users, and in order to avoid having their images used, users must opt out of the Muse Image tool.

This has all come as a surprise to many celebrities and the organizations that represent them. The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA quickly issued a statement regarding the new Instagram policy: “Anything other than a clear and conspicuous OPT-IN for these types of uses of Instagram users’ images is unacceptable, and an utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use.” The union also posted an instruction guide on how to opt out of the AI feature “to avoid AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching your account to private.”

Similarly, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the management company behind Ariana Grande, Tom Hanks, Beyoncé, Will Smith, Adele, Zendaya, Lady Gaga and many others, also voiced opposition to the AI feature. “No one’s name, image, likeness, voice, or creative work should be used by any third party, including AI models, without clear, documented consent. True innovation puts creators first: respecting their rights, protecting their livelihoods, and giving them real control, not handing it over to platforms,” CAA said in a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “We have raised our concerns with Meta on behalf of our clients, voicing our disapproval and perspective on the need for a more responsible approach. We call on Meta to make protection the default on Muse Image, not the exception, and enable individuals to opt in if they want to allow usage of their image or likeness for AI content creation.”

Fuel on the Anti-AI Fire: AI has enough public perception problems now that nearly every actor and singer is voicing concerns about the future of their livelihoods in the face of AI tools threatening to replace them. The bad marketing AI didn’t need was Zuckerberg taking his habitual overreach regarding data and privacy into the supposed safe space of Instagram.

I’ve long said that if it weren’t for Instagram constantly giving Meta and Zuckerberg a positive brand wash, Meta would look even worse. Now that Zuckerberg has forced his AI obsession onto Instagram, we may see the first major cracks form in what has been Meta’s most bulletproof brand. This should also serve as a warning to other social media platforms engaging in such AI tactics with user data and images. Social media platforms are built on trust. But if users can’t trust that their special moments will remain theirs to do with as they see fit, no matter what the “Terms and Conditions” say in the fine print, many users will find other ways to share the content that these platforms are built on.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

“You can’t turn off the power of love.” That’s what hitmaking horror film producer Jason Blum said today on social media, announcing the straight-to-video release of Soulm8te, a movie about a humanoid robot girlfriend gone murderously rogue. However, it appears that you can stop the power of love if it involves the sci-fi/horror subgenre of female robot companions rebelling against their masters.

The film, directed by Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother), was announced in 2024 by producer James Wan (Insidious, The Conjuring) as “a thrilling and seductive addition to the M3GAN universe.” But while the original Wan-produced M3GAN, about an AI-powered robot doll that becomes a killer, was a smash hit ($180 million worldwide), the sequel, M3GAN 2.0, barely made $39 million against a $25 million budget (not including marketing). What seemed like a burgeoning franchise of killer robot stories was quickly revealed to be a one-hit wonder. But this was only apparent after Soulm8te had already been announced as part of its cinematic universe.

Universal Pictures’ original plan was to release Soulm8te on January 2, 2026. But after months of hanging in Hollywood limbo, the studio decided to send the film straight-to-video, which is usually a sign that all involved were expecting a box office bomb. Official budget numbers haven’t been released, but based on the budgets for M3GAN and its sequel, $12 million and $25 million, respectively, the budget for Soulm8te was likely somewhere in that range.

The topic of robot girlfriends has taken off in recent years. In 2025, Warner Bros. released Companion, another film about a robot girlfriend who takes matters into her own hands and starts killing anyone who gets in her way. Directed by Drew Hancock and starring Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets) and Jack Quaid (The Boys), the film was generally received as the solid although simplistic science fiction tale that it was. With a reported budget of just $10 million, the $37 million worldwide box office for the film was technically a success, but perhaps also a warning sign that this isn’t a story people are eager to watch.

It could be that the success of A24’s 2015 release Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland and starring Oscar Isaac (Dune, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), which has become a cult favorite, led some to believe that the rise of AI might make such stories even more relevant and box office-friendly. But when you look closer, even back then, the film only grossed around $37 million against a $15 million budget. A relative success, but not a bull signal to make more scorned robot girlfriend movies.

There’s also another potential wrinkle to the tepid interest in robot companions flipping out on their owners—the rise of real-world AI. In the last two years, nearly every notable AI CEO has predicted massive AI-driven job losses and openly discussed the idea of government-backed Universal Basic Income to replace the loss of white-collar and blue-collar jobs. Given that, the last thing many people want to hear is how the AI-powered robot they, in the very near future, look to for support might go haywire and ruin their lives. Even in fiction, the prospect apparently isn’t very enthralling.

So, from a producer and script perspective, what’s the answer? Do audiences instead want tales of humans stopping AI and humanoid robots from ever asserting dominance? Would that drive larger audiences to the theater? If the reception for Gore Verbinski’s 2026 Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is any indication, winning the box office via such tales may be easier said than done. Starring Sam Rockwell (Moon), Juno Temple (Fargo), Zazie Beetz (Joker), and Michael Peña (Ant-Man), the film (NO SPOILERS) is exactly the kind of hopeful and comedic AI-related film that one might expect to draw theatrical interest. Nevertheless, on a budget of $20 million, the film only pulled in $9.7 million worldwide.

Many Hollywood producers will tell you that some of the most successful films, no matter what the genre, often involve the protagonist and their friends reflecting on their journey of triumph or acceptance of loss in the last act of the film. But with real-world AI, the third act and how all this technology actually plays out for humanity will be extremely hard to predict. Hollywood is trying, but the stories aren’t quite landing at the box office. It seems the public is still in the very early stages of figuring out how it really feels about AI and robots. Now that movies like The Terminator and its evil Skynet AI from decades past are slowly morphing into real life, the stories we tell about AI are, for many, disturbingly close to reality. As a result, audiences may be less tolerant of a “hero’s journey” that doesn’t end with humanity definitively coming out on top.

The trailer for Soulm8te is out now, and the film will be released on streaming on August 1. ✍︎

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🎬 A24 Damage Control Mode While Building Its AI Studio

1. When the darling of cutting-edge film, A24, took a massive $75 million influx of cash from Google’s DeepMind AI unit last week, a number of film fans took it as a signal that the traditional filmmaker-centric party is over at the studio. Would the home of famously anti-AI Heretic directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who added “No Generative AI was used in the making of this film” to the credits of their 2024 hit horror film, move against its own filmmakers? How can A24 serve Google’s AI filmmaking goals while also supporting Kane Parsons, director of the studio’s biggest hit, Backrooms, as the auteur simultaneously blasts AI by saying, “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would”? Those are some of the questions being aimed at A24 in the wake of the massive funding from Google AI.

As a result, the usually critic-proof studio that rarely comments on itself actually responded to the AI concerns from theatergoers and film insiders alike. “This is a research partnership. We’re working side-by-side with DeepMind’s researchers to learn, iterate, and build, having an active hand in shaping new tools and workflows,” A24 representative Sophia Shin told Wired in an email following the investment news backlash. “Our relationship with our audience is something we don’t take for granted. This partnership exists because we want to dictate what tools get built for artists, and so they have a voice in shaping them rather than having tools handed to them. We’d rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines.”

What It Means: Hollywood still seems fairly split on the topic of AI, with some keeping an open mind to what it can offer as a tool, and others dismissing it wholesale as a poison to art in general. What A24 has demonstrated, despite the anti-AI stance of some of its directors, is that it is a business first, and its independent film-esque arthouse trappings are just that: good marketing and product design, nothing more. This isn’t an indictment of A24, rather, it’s a signal that A24 is in it for the long game and not just an altruistic hobby for its co-founders, Daniel Katz and David Fenkel. Additionally, former Adobe tech executive and venture capitalist Scott Belsky joined the studio last year to lead A24 Labs, so any director working with the studio should already be on notice that A24 is very interested in being at the forefront of using technology to tell its stories in any way possible.

Following the public outcry against the Google partnership, Belsky took to Twitter/X to offer his own take. “There is a right and wrong way to use technology — and when it’s new, the spectrum is entirely unclear,” said Belsky. “Whether it was the locomotive, the internet, the camera, computer graphics/CGI…all unclear at first. But the work to figure it out is the work that advances every industry.”

Given Belsky’s mandate to aggressively integrate AI tools into A24’s production process, it seems likely that the studio will become one of the first studios to make and distribute an AI-generated or at least heavily AI-assisted film that is widely released in theaters. Does that mean directors like Parsons and the team behind Heretic will leave? Or will they be convinced by Belsky’s internal efforts that AI isn’t the beginning of the end of film artistry, but just another tool? We’ll know relatively soon. None of the directors are signed to exclusive deals with A24, but Parsons’ Backrooms is now A24’s biggest success ever at $330 million worldwide, and the studio probably wants to cash in on that win with a sequel. As for Heretic directors Beck and Woods, they’re currently in production on 2027’s A Quiet Place Part III as screenwriters, with no word on their next project as directors.

It’s too early to tell whether the anti-AI crowd in Hollywood will remain firm in their stance, but all signs point to AI being widely adopted in the industry in the next couple of years. Beyond major studios experimenting with AI for animation, sound design, and VFX, when a boutique-ish studio like A24 dives headlong into the AI waters, it’s almost a kind of cultural permission slip for those who might have been on the fence, for better or worse. One thing I’m fairly confident in is that if there is a way to employ AI in filmmaking that isn’t cheap and reductive, the odds are high that A24 will be one of the studios to find the director who will be able to do it.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

🎬 Google’s Big Tech Hollywood Buyout via A24

1. The supposedly coolest film studio in Hollywood, A24, the studio behind the hit horror film Backrooms, is now in bed with Google thanks to a $75 million investment from the search giant. The relationship is framed as focused on “bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and next-generation entertainment,” but pretty much everyone in Hollywood believes the investment is related to AI-generated films due to the fact that Google’s AI unit, DeepMind, is attached to the funding.

“We believe the best way to develop tools that empower artists is to work directly with them,” said Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, in a statement. “By collaborating with filmmakers and industry leaders like A24 from the beginning, we can build new AI features to support artists in authentic, meaningful storytelling that helps enable their creative vision.”

Shotgun Wedding? A24 generally prides itself on craft and original filmmaking, so pairing with Google to help develop AI-generated films isn’t what most people were expecting from the studio. Perhaps the most surprised was Backrooms director Kane Parsons, who is a very vocal opponent of AI filmmaking. “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would,” says Parsons. “Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools.” However, the fact that Parsons is now responsible for A24’s highest-grossing film ever, at $301 million worldwide, didn’t stop the film studio from making the AI deal. That somewhat tracks if you look at the studio’s earlier history with tech investors.

A24 also took $75 million in investment dollars from Thrive Capital (founded by Josh Kushner, brother to Jared Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Trump) back in 2024. It’s also worth noting that Thrive Capital is an investor in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which recently went public and made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. So while none of these connections should be automatically used to form some broad determination on the trajectory of A24 as a studio, these connections could have varying implications in the future. For example, some were disturbed by Amazon’s decision to drop the film Artificial, by director Luca Guadagnino, which presents a critical take on Sam Altman’s career, after Amazon secured a deal with OpenAI. It’s now worth wondering if Darren Aronofsky’s film on Elon Musk, currently in development at A24, might suddenly hit unexpected turbulent waters on its way to release.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

📺 Snap’s Smartglasses As Streaming Content Platform?

1. Although Snap CEO Evan Spiegel didn’t emphasize the AI aspects of the company’s new Specs smartglasses, the self-contained device does in fact offer AI assistance. Specifically, the device will offer what Snap calls contextual AI assistance, which indicates that the AI assistance will be integrated into the spatial computing and location-specific aspects of the device. The company is also allowing for agentic development on the platform via its Lens Studio, with a developer preview being brought to Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor.

Mini Movie Theater: Spiegel mentioned Apple’s Vision Pro during his Specs presentation, and now we know why. Specs also allow for users to stream movies and TV shows via a virtual display that mimics a 115-inch home cinema screen that might sit roughly 10 feet away from the viewer. Although the Vision Pro was made with movie lovers in mind, even its most dedicated users seem hesitant to sit in public spaces with the large goggle-like device on while watching content. On the contrary, Specs promises to offer personal cinema viewing in a package that looks similar to normal shades. Still, in my experience, the Vision Pro movie-watching experience is second only to real-life IMAX screens, so I wouldn’t rush to put Specs on the same playing field. During my testing of the previous version of Specs, called Spectacles, images were clean and vivid, and nothing I’d compare to Vision Pro when it comes ot wathcing videos. But I still haven’t tested Specs, so we’ll see if it lives up to Apple’s challenge when it’s released this fall.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

In the U.S., “eating your own dog food,” or dogfooding, is shorthand for company executives testing and using their own products as normal consumers might. But dogfooding isn’t just about testing. On another level, the term evokes the image of an executive demonstrating that the company’s product is so trusted, so beloved by its creator, that even he uses it away from the marketing glare of cameras and commercials. The message: You can trust that this product is good for you because we don’t just make it, we use it.

This trust-via-usage demonstration dynamic has always seemed particularly relevant when it comes to wearable technology. Next to putting a product into your body (food, pharmaceuticals, etc.), paying to put a product on your body is one of the most intimate things a consumer can do. So, in my years of covering wearable tech, the first thing I look for is whether the CEO is actually using the wearable tech outside of the launch event window. I think it’s reasonable to assume that, if a founder has invested millions, or hundreds of millions, into a product he expects the public to wear and use daily, he should do the same. But in the realm of smartglasses, that’s not always how things seem to work out.

At this weekend’s UFC Freedom 250 event, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance, but his Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses were nowhere in sight. Likewise, a quick check of his Instagram account reveals that, at least in the last few months, his non-marketing daily activities appear to be smartglasses-free. Zuckerberg isn’t alone, but he is the most high-profile wearable exec example available. Meanwhile, social media clout chasers have taken to using Meta’s glasses to record sometimes troubling interactions with strangers in public who don’t always know they’re being recorded to go viral. Predictably, this has led to some simmering cultural backlash against any kind of camera-enabled smartglasses worn in public.

So when Snap (maker of Snapchat and Spectacles camera glasses) returned to the spotlight this week with its new Specs augmented reality (AR) smartglasses, I was guardedly excited.

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🤖 Elon Musk Wins First Leg of the AI Race

1. Elon Musk may have lost his battle against Sam Altman in court, but today he has officially beaten OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to launch the first major AI startup initial public offering (IPO) by offering shares in xAI via SpaceX stock. The initial price for the stock was projected to be $135 a share, ultimately valuing the company at around $1.77 trillion, with some expecting that number to reach $2 trillion in short order.

“The other aerospace companies, they build good rockets and everything. They were simply not pursuing the technology that’s necessary to make life multiplanetary. To make Star Trek. To make the exciting science futures that we’ve read about real,” said Musk on the floor of Nasdaq at the opening bell this morning. “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system at some point, we want to be able to take you there… I’m confident at this point that the incredible team that we have here will do that for you.”

Backstory: For those who haven’t been keeping track, SpaceX, which is generally focused on space missions, is also the parent company of Musk’s Starlink satellite internet connectivity startup and xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, which now also controls X (formerly known as Twitter) and Grok. The IPO makes Musk the world’s first trillionaire at $1.1 trillion.


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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

🏀 NBA’s Flagrant AI Foul

1. The NBA Finals have captured everyone’s attention as the New York Knicks attempt to win their first championship in 53 years against the San Antonio Spurs, led by 7-foot-5 center Victor “The Alien” Wembanyama. This year’s Playoffs even inspired an AI anime mini-series called Attack on Wemby, mirroring the style and plot of Attack on Titan. But that might be where the AI fun stops for this year’s NBA contest, as ESPN fumbled the media ball by rolling out an AI-generated image that infuriated many fans. The image was supposed to show former Spurs guard Tony Parker during a past Finals win, but instead of using the real photo of the athlete, an AI-generated replacement face of Parker appeared. The offending AI image quickly went viral, with many fans asking why the perfectly usable original image hadn’t been used.

Subsequently, an ESPN spokesperson confirmed to Front Office Sports that the image was AI and was part of “an experiment” to liven up images for the broadcast. ESPN also used AI to display an altered version of NBA legend Bill Russell at another point in the broadcast.

You’ve Been Warned: The only reason this use of AI didn’t go off perfectly is because the team working on the spots was sloppy. But that won’t last long. Generative AI imagery and animation continue to improve, and so too will the people using it. So what was an outrage this week will next year probably go completely unnoticed. That may be a good thing for ESPN, but fans might want to know when they’re viewing real images from sports history versus realistic AI art. It should also be noted that ESPN is under the Disney umbrella, where, until very recently, there were plans to integrate OpenAI’s Sora AI video into the Disney+ app before the deal fell apart. It appears that, with or without OpenAI, Disney plans on forging ahead with AI content on its platforms.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.

🎬 The Rise of AI Horror Films

1. Self-described AI-native film production company Secret Level has teamed up with one of the most successful horror movie producers of all time for its next project. Secret Level’s Christina Lee Storm will co-produce alongside Steven Schneider (Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch, Insidious) a film called Terrarium, directed by Jason Zada. The film will also have backing from Artlist, which will serve as the film’s financing arm. “This is a new kind of film and it deserves the most forward thinking partners, filmmakers, artists, and collaborators,” said Storm via her LinkedIn account. “Looking forward to pioneering long form Done Right and sharing best practices.”

What It Means: I’ve long advocated for the idea that the two pioneering forms of AI film will be live-action horror and animation. My preview of Amazon’s work on AI animation came to fruition this week with the announcement of three new Amazon Prime Video AI-animated series greenlit at the studio. Despite one of the traditional animators working with Amazon dropping out of the project after anti-AI fan backlash, the AI series remains on track. With Terrarium, we have one of the masters of horror film production steering the enterprise, which means it could very well turn out to be the first major AI hit feature film. Schneider also produced the V/H/S horror anthology franchise, the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, Split, Blair Witch, and many other successful horror films. His involvement is a signal that Terrarium isn’t another AI video experiment.

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MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.