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From July 14 to November 9, 2023, the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, representing 160,000 people, went on strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Eventually, both sides agreed to terms that theoretically would put limits on how actors images and output could be used. Strike over, everybody went back to work and the entertainment industrial complex started humming again. But they apparently never took heed of the lessons offered by a somewhat obscure 2013 movie, The Congress, which eerily anticipated the crisis Hollywood is now facing. Caught by surprise? Really? Fast-forward to September of 2025. Dutch actor and comedian Eline Van der Veldens company Particle6 released an AI “actor” named Tilly Norwood with the express intention of her becoming the next Scarlett Johansson. The bot had its own social media presence, appeared in comedy sketches, and breathlessly declared, “I may be AI, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now. I am so excited for what’s coming next!” The news that there were agents in talks to sign Norwood, the way they might sign a real actor, sparked an incredible Hollywood firestorm. Lots of denunciations of this use of technology. Lots of claims that this was unfair. And lots and lots of workplace anxiety. But should they really have been this surprised? Futurist Amy Webb suggests not. As she says, Lets not kid ourselves: theyve had more than a decade to prepare for this. Toy Story, launched in 1995, was the first full-length feature film to be fully animated, followed by a string of other hits that did very well without real actors, thank you very much. Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider game star that was launched in 1996, became a movie character in 2001. In 2002, a simulated movie star played the lead in the science fiction movie Simone. In 2011, Japanese idol group AKB48 introduced a new memberAimi Eguchi. She became popular and was added to the band only to graduate when her identity as a composite of the bands other actors was revealed. By 2016, we had AI-generated influencers like Lil Miquela who appear in advertisements, garner thousands of followers, and are paid to endorse brands. And the precedent for Tilly signing with an agent has already been establishedMiquela signed on with CAA as its first virtual client as far back as 2020. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tilly Norwood (@tillynorwood) Willful blind spots Now seemingly caught by surprise, what did the strategists in Hollywood miss? Most likely, too much focus on their own industry. Fractious labor relations, contract negotiations, and changing entertainment consumption behavior can eat up a lot of executive bandwidth. This leads to not thinking in terms of the larger arenas in which competition takes place. The big threat to this business was not other industry players but something coming along that made what they did unnecessary, undesirable, or too expensive. Once an innovation has demonstrated its efficacy, particularly if it is popular and making money for someone, it is almost impossible to put the genie back in its bottle (see: targeted Internet advertising or ride-sharing). It is also no secret that some moviemakers longed to put AI-generated actors in leading roles, even experimenting with bringing some back from the dead. But perhaps the most significant reason I believe they didnt pick up on the weak signals is because they didnt want to. Accepting the idea of digital acting and the creation of digital worlds means accepting the idea that expertise, talent, and painfully acquired skills will become obsolete. Unfortunately, the law of disruptionin which the complicated and difficult becomes easy and the expensive becomes cheapdoesnt really care about your preferences. Preparing for an existential threat What might they have done to prepare? They could have launched small-scale experiments using digital actors to learn about audience acceptance, production workflows, and creative possibilities. They could have allocated resources to dedicated teams exploring new forms of storytelling. With the constraints of physical acting and reality removed, stories could be developed that could be as revolutionary as the movies themselves were when they created new possibilities beyond what could be done on a physical stage. They could have worked with regulators and their unions to establish a glide path for AI in their sector that would be fair with respect to intellectual property. They could have seriously invested in the digital technologies used to create these new forms of entertainment, rather than leaving all this to technology companies such as Netflix. The end of mass market entertainment? Tilly Norwood isn’t the disruptionshe’s the warning shot. The real disruption comes when AI can generate not just actors, but entire films, on demand, personalized to individual viewer preferences, at essentially zero marginal cost. The studios that survive won’t be the ones with the biggest IP libraries or the most prestigious awards. They’ll be the ones who recognize that the fundamental assumptions of their industrythat content is scarce, that talent is human, that stories are fixedare all being systematically dismantled, and come up with new business models that take advantage of the post-inflection point world. The weak signals are there. The question is: who has the appetite to listen?
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E-Commerce
Ukraine’s state security service has unveiled an upgraded sea drone it says can now operate anywhere in the Black Sea, carry heavier weapons and use artificial intelligence for targeting.Ukraine has used the unmanned naval drones to target Russian shipping and infrastructure in the Black Sea. The Security Service of Ukraine, known by its Ukrainian acronym SBU, has credited strikes by the unmanned vessel known as the “Sea Baby” with forcing a strategic shift in Russia’s naval operations.The range of the Sea Baby was expanded from 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) to 1,500 kilometers (930 miles), SBU said. It can carry up to 2,000 kilograms (about 4,400 pounds) of payload, SBU officials said.At a demonstration attended by The Associated Press, variants included vessels fitted with a multiple-rocket launcher and another with a stabilized machine-gun turret.SBU Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych said the new vessels also feature AI-assisted friend-or-foe targeting systems and can launch small aerial attack drones and multilayered self-destruct systems to prevent capture. Developing a new kind of naval warfare Drone strikes have been used in successful attacks against 11 Russian vessels, including frigates and missile carriers, SBU said, prompting the Russian navy to relocate its main base from Sevastopol in Crimea to Novorossiysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast.“The SBU became the first in the world to pioneer this new kind of naval warfare and we continue to advance it,” Lukashevych said, adding that the Sea Baby has evolved from a single-use strike craft into a reusable, multipurpose platform that expands Ukraine’s offensive options.Authorities asked that the time and location of the demonstration not be made public for security reasons.The craft are operated remotely from a mobile control center inside a van, where operators use a bank of screens and controls.“Cohesion of the crew members is probably the most important thing. We are constantly working on that,” said one operator who was identified only by his call sign, “Scout,” per Ukrainian military protocol. Ukrainian sea drones helped push back Russia’s navy The SBU also said sea drones helped carry out other high-profile strikes, including repeated attacks on the Crimean Bridge, most recently targeting its underwater supports in a bid to to render it unusable for heavy military transport.The Sea Baby program is partially funded by public donations through a state-run initiative and is coordinated with Ukraine’s military and political leadership.The evolution from expendable strike boats to reusable, networked drones marks an important advance in asymmetric naval warfare, Lukashevych said.“On this new product, we have installed rocket weaponry that will allow us to work from a large distance outside of the attack range of enemy fire. We can use such platforms to carry heavy weaponry,” he said. “Here we can show Ukrainians the most effective use of the money they have donated to us.” Associated Press journalists Alex Babenko, Yehor Konovalov and Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report. Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine Efrem Lukatsky and Derek Gatopoulos, Associated Press
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Spending just 36 minutes listening to your own brain waves, over four sessions, can reduce stress and anxiety, according to a new study by neuroscientists at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Published in the journal Global Advances in Integrative Medicine and Health, the study looked at how to reduce stress-related symptoms in 144 healthcare workers with moderate-to-high levels of perceived stress. The healthcare workers were placed in two groups: one that received four sessions of a sound-based relaxation intervention over two weeks, and another that was put on a control group waitlist. The workers spent a little over half an hour relaxing in a zero-gravity chair with their eyes closed as closed-loop, acoustic neuromodulation technology translated their brainwaves into personalized tones in real time, the idea being that the echoed tones interact with the brain to balance and quiet itself and release stress patterns. When researchers measured the results after six-to-eight weeks, they found the participants reported meaningful reductions in stress, anxiety, and insomnia, as well as significant reductions in fatigue and depression, and improved subjective cognition. These results suggest that closed-loop acoustic neuromodulation is a safe, scalable, and effective option to complement organizational strategies for supporting healthcare worker brain health and well-being, said Charles H. Tegeler, M.D., professor of neurology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and principal investigator of the study. We are eager to identify ways to broadly offer the intervention to teammates across our health system and beyond. What makes this different from previous studies on neuromodulation is that it streamlined the treatment process with fewer, shorter sessions, making the treatment more practical and accessible for real-world application. It also included study participants regardless of their medication or substance use.
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