103 dispatches, newest first.
- How the lot was shotSeven clips, one long drive, and cuts you are not meant to see. What it takes to make a generated camera move look like it never stopped.
- One person made a 13-minute AI filmThe film is MAKE BELIEVE, directed by Montlouis Mane and made for the Higgsfield Global Film Festival 2026. He describes it as entirely computer-generated and "designed not to...
- Could you prove your last project wasn't made with AI?No Film School ran a piece last week by Matt Allen making an argument I haven't been able to put down: claiming your work is human-made no longer works as an assumed baseline with...
- Robin Williams' daughter spotted an AI fake of her father in one listenAn AI video of Robin Williams "talking about conspiracies" spread on X. On Monday, his daughter Zelda called it out: "Anyone who claims to be a fan who believes it clearly...
- The world's first AI actress just glitched on Piers Morgan's showTilly Norwood, billed as the world's first "AI actor," switched to Chinese mid-answer when actor Tom Conti asked her a simple question: are the other actors in her film real? Her...
- California just passed a tax credit that pays for editors, not softwareOn September 19, Governor Newsom signed AB 2319, California's first standalone tax credit for post-production work. Picture editorial. Sound. Music. Visual effects. Finishing...
- Disney's new tech boss ran a chatbot companyLast week Disney named Karandeep Anand (the CEO of Character.AI) its first-ever chief technology officer. He starts October 2nd, in a brand-new role, reporting straight to CEO...
- Amazon just changed an actor's mouthLast week Prime Video switched on AI lip-sync for the German series Maxton Hall. It reads the actors' mouth movements on screen and alters them so they match the English dub.
- Those jobs are gone, babe."That's Paul Schrader. The man who wrote Taxi Driver, and directed American Gigolo and First Reformed. He said it to The Hollywood Reporter, about AI replacing actors, and he...
- A TV station put AI on the air this week, and its own press release didn't mention itMonday, KSAT in San Antonio launched a new 1pm newscast. The announcement they put out is all about more local stories. Not one word about AI in it. The San Antonio Express-News...
- Samsung made an ad for filmmakers, and the filmmaker in it doesn't existThe launch film for its new P9 portable SSD (pitched at pros recording 12K RAW) carries a small on-screen line throughout: "This content was created using generative AI."
- Somebody finally scored every job on a film set against AI, one job at a timeThe Creators Coalition on AI (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Daniel Kwan, Ted Tremper and others) launched an Impact Visualizer last week. Working professionals score what each AI tool can...
- The last piece of Sora shuts off September 24OpenAI's own deprecation page says the Sora API and every Sora 2 model shut down that day, and the "recommended replacement" column is empty. The app itself was switched off in...
- Vertical Dramas Kept LA WorkingVertical microdramas (the phone-sized soaps) were the lifeline after 2023. This week The Hollywood Reporter talked to the people inside it. A talent manager says casting...
- Local TV's “Exposed” List Has My JobNewscastStudio's Dak's Take names producers, directors, technical operators, graphics, editing, some engineering, routine weather and some anchors, and it's careful about why: not...
- Nobody Put An AI On The Anchor DeskThis week Scripps cut 27 more leadership roles and reorganised about 60 stations across 40 markets into 11 regions, one general manager over as many as four markets. 270 people...
- An editor with the best part of two decades in Premiere handed his timeline to an AIBut the comments underneath are the actual story.
- They gave you an AILet me be precise, because the precise version is more interesting than the angry one. Python is not gone from the free version. The console API is still there. What moved to...
- The chief operating officer of Luma AI (an AI video company) sat down with VP Land andHer words: telling someone "everything you know about your guild is about to change, all you need to do is become a prompt engineer" is "one of the first and worst value props to...
- He Put Your Job Title In The TradesDavid Barber (a working supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer) argues that prompt-driven generative AI outputs shouldn't be copyrightable, and that anything containing...
- Instagram Drew A LineWhat actually happened: the optional "AI creator" label is now "AI-generated profile," and for the first time there's a consequence, accounts featuring an AI-generated person who...
- If you've ever wondered what it actually looks like when the work goes away (somebodyIf you've ever wondered what it actually looks like when the work goes away (somebody filmed it. Sixth Tone released a documentary this week following China's short-drama industry...
- Avid just drew the line itselfThat's the rung a lot of us climbed. Four hundred bad cuts, somebody senior fixing them.
- The work got betterThe work got better. The argument disappeared. I'm not sure that's a win. In June, Henry Daubrez (a resident filmmaker at Google Labs) released chapter one of an AI-animated...
- I didn't have the sentence eitherI DIDN'T HAVE THE SENTENCE EITHER DON'T PRETEND IT ISN'T REAL
- A billion job adsA BILLION JOB ADS MORE IN YOUR FAVOUR THAN YOU THINK
- This is your jobTHIS IS YOUR JOB "AI MADE A MOVIE"
- The wrong half of this storyEveryone's about to argue about the wrong half of this story. Sunny Hostin of "The View" has licensed her name and likeness to the AI studio Fountain 0, to develop AI-produced...
- I was hoping it tooI WAS HOPING IT TOO THE PLAN WE NEVER SAID OUT LOUD
- They showed their homeworkTHEY SHOWED THEIR HOMEWORK. "IS THIS AI-ASSISTED, OR DID A MACHINE JUST DO MY JOB?"
- It's not the person with 25 years in the chairIT'S NOT THE PERSON WITH 25 YEARS IN THE CHAIR. IT SAYS THE OPPOSITE.
- On Monday, Australia's record industry body did something nobody in film or TV has doneOn Monday, Australia's record industry body did something nobody in film or TV has done yet: it wrote the line down. Under ARIA's updated Code of Practice, a recording made with...
- Adobe isn't selling you better soundThat Adobe AI audio headline you saw has the product backwards, and the difference matters if sound is how you make a living. Last week Adobe made Generate Music, Generate Speech...
- You filled that archiveIf you've spent twenty years filling somebody else's archive, this one is worth ten minutes of your time. On Monday, Thomson Reuters launched "Thomson," its own large language...
- The AI cleanup tool admits what it can't do*Extracted from brief-2026-08-26.md. `` is a hard compliance requirement on every platform.*
- The real reason you can't use AI at work*Extracted from brief-2026-08-26.md. `` is a hard compliance requirement on every platform.*
- A studio said "no AI" on cameraA studio said "no AI" on camera. Nobody believed them. Here's the actual tell. System 3 released a trailer for a classic game revival last week (genuinely well made, solid...
- This number should scare anyone with 15 years in productionThis number should scare anyone with 15 years in production. LA County's own economic office says the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger could put 4,500 production...
- Here's why nobody believed the denialHere's why nobody believed the denial. A game publisher, System 3, put out a trailer for a classic series revival last week. Within a day their own audience was calling the...
- Everyone's laughing at the wrong part of this storyEveryone's laughing at the wrong part of this story. Roku quietly added a channel called Fairground (24 hours a day of AI-generated shows, interrupted by AI-generated ads. No...
- You're getting more work and making lessYou're getting more work and making less money for it. That's not you (it's the market. Upwork surveyed 2,400 working professionals this spring: creative and AI-production...
- A real director watches the AI tool that just shot a 30-second fight scene with no cutsA real director watches the AI tool that just shot a 30-second fight scene with no cuts. Ten days ago, Higgsfield's Cinema Studio 4.0 went live. Within a day, an independent...
- A hit show's VFX pipeline already runs on AIA hit show's entire VFX pipeline already runs on AI (and nobody in the US is talking about it. Swords Into Plowshares, a real, currently-airing historical drama on Chinese state...
- Your AI subscription just got quietly worseYour AI subscription may have just gotten quietly worse (and the price tag won't tell you. Runway is retiring its Unlimited plan on September 1st for a new "Max" plan. Same...
- A Local TV Giant Just Told Wall Street It's Becoming an 'AI-Powered' CompanyThis week, E.W. Scripps (one of the largest local TV station owners in the country) cut 268 jobs and told Wall Street, in its own CEO's words, that it's becoming an "AI-powered...
- OpenAI Just Killed Its Own Most-Hyped AI Video ToolLess than 18 months after launch, OpenAI is shutting down Sora completely, the consumer app back in April, and its developer API on September 24th.
- A New Report Says AI Isn't What's Actually Killing Hollywood JobsAn Otis College of Art and Design study found California's creative sector lost 114,000 jobs since 2022. But the researchers' own finding: "no single respondent described AI as...
- A studio just brought Val Kilmer back with AI"As Deep as the Grave" (FirstLine Films) released 7 minutes of AI-recreated footage of Kilmer, who died in 2025, built from family archive photos and pre-tracheotomy voice...
- The CEO Of One Of The Biggest AI Labs Just Admitted Nobody Trusts His IndustryThis week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted publicly that his industry has a "crisis of trust", and that the criticism is fair. Airbnb's CEO said almost the same thing days later.
- Robin Williams's Kids Just Took Back His Instagram To Fight The AI Being Made Of HimZak, Zelda, and Cody Williams reactivated their father's Instagram this week (dormant since his death in 2014) specifically to fight AI-generated content using his voice and face...
- An AI Company Just Made Studio-Quality Voice Cloning Nine Times Cheaper Than ElevenLabsPika launched four AI audio tools in one drop this week: voice cloning, full songs from a prompt, sound effects from a sentence, and auto-scoring for video. Their own numbers...
- ByteDance Just Signed a Deal With Hollywood's Biggest Trade GroupByteDance (TikTok's parent company) signed an agreement with the Motion Picture Association on August 17, covering Seedance (their video model) and Seedream (their image model)...
- The Exact Workflow Used to Make a 95-Minute AI Feature Film Is Now a Free CertificateHiggsfield (the company behind the controversial AI features "Hell Grind" and "The Cully Hill Boys") just launched Higgsfield Academy: free education teaching the real workflow...
- One AI Company's Revenue Went From $20M to $700M In a YearHiggsfield raised $400M this week at a $5.4B valuation (4x its January number, with Goldman Sachs and Intel in the round. That's the headline. Here's the number that actually...
- The tools used to make this AI series are already out of dateA follow-up to my earlier post on "Castle Walls", Prime Video's first fully AI-generated series, from Ay Yapım/AI Yapım. Here's how they actually built it: ChatGPT for writing and...
- The First Fully AI-Generated TV Series Just Premiered WorldwideTurkish studio Ay Yapim released "Castle Walls", 2 episodes, premiered worldwide on Prime Video August 12. Set at Alamut Castle, built with the studio's own proprietary AI model...
- There's Now a TV Channel That's 100% AI-GeneratedFairground AI Creator TV (the first 24/7 FAST channel built entirely from AI-generated content) launched this month on Roku and LG, pulling from 100+ AI creators worldwide and...
- James Gunn Publicly Mocked AI Art
- An Activist Investor Just Told a Studio: Stop Making New ContentAn activist investor just told a movie studio: stop making new content, license the old stuff to AI instead. Anson Funds, a top-5 Lionsgate shareholder, told the board to license...
- A Nonprofit Just Built a Seminar to Teach Editors How to Turn AI OffA nonprofit just built an entire seminar to teach documentary editors one thing: how to turn AI off. Field of Vision and the Freedom of the Press Foundation's 6th annual Digital...
- The World's First Fully AI News Network Just Went LiveThe world's first fully AI news network just went live (and it wasn't a demo, it actually broadcast. Mirage put four AI-generated anchors on a live stream on X for a full day...
- A $2M movie just came outA $2M movie just came out. 110 minutes, real cast, a real plot. Not one second of it was filmed. "The Cully Hill Boys" is the first fully AI-generated feature film built on...
- Brad Pitt Says AI Could Help More Mid-Budget Films Get MadeBrad Pitt just told Esquire: "AI is going to be the very thing that... helps these mid-budget films ($40 to $90 million films) get made." He called it "a very interesting...
- Autodesk Just Launched an AI Tool That Gives Directors Back Creative ControlAutodesk just launched an AI tool built to solve generative video's biggest complaint: that AI took the steering wheel away from the director. Flow Studio's new 3D Editor + Canvas...
- A viral AI short film breaks down exactly what it would have cost to shoot for realA viral AI short film breaks down exactly what it would have cost to shoot for real (professional tier, fully itemized: $55K-$85K. The AI version: three still images, about...
- One Prompt Just Remade 'The Office'A partner at Andreessen Horowitz typed one simple text prompt into a tool that routes to a Chinese AI model, MiniMax H3. Out came Dwight and Jim, from The Office. That model isn't...
- Hollywood Is Fighting AI in PublicA recent AP report called Hollywood's relationship with AI "the new cosmetic surgery" (everyone knows it's happening, almost nobody admits it. The receipts: Amazon MGM is hiring a...
- 400,000 Later: AI Filmmaking Still Isn't Cheap
- Not a Big Supporter of AI." Until This Scene
- He Said He Drew It Himself
- The Fastest-Growing Video Format Skips the Crew
- Your Algorithm Does Not Work Anymore.”
- What Happens to Location Scouting Now?
- OpenAI Flew Influencers to a Luxury Retreat to Post About ChatGPT
- 1 in 10 Job Postings at Major Studios Were AI-Connected Last Month
- Your Voice Now Costs $0.25 a Second to Clone
- Studios Call It AI Savings
- The AI Model That Should Worry Your Sound Department Just Launched
- Darren Aronofsky Just Filed to Raise $15 Million for an AI Movie Studio
- Stop Scrolling and Pay Attention, Or Get Fined $5,000 a Day
- The Director Of District 9 Just Released An AI Film
- That "AI Training Is Just Fair Use" Story You Keep Hearing?
- I saw a filmmaker get personally attacked this week (for saying one word out loudI saw a filmmaker get personally attacked this week (for saying one word out loud. AI. Not for posting an AI video. Just for mentioning it. In a group of thousands of people...
- A Filmmaker Just Turned Down $13,000A filmmaker just turned down about $13,000 (because it meant giving away his idea. Ikenna Mokwe was offered that deal to make a pilot. The catch: the company would own his idea...
- Tomorrow, AI Content Labeling Becomes LawTomorrow, AI content labeling becomes law. And it reaches past the EU, whether you're ready or not. The EU AI Act's transparency rules go into force August 2. Most creators have...
- Google's New AI Just Gave a Robot a BodyGoogle's new AI just gave a robot a body. And the same reasoning core is already inside your editing tools. Everyone's watching this as a robotics story. It's actually a story...
- Disney Just Cut ~1,000 Jobs
- The World's Biggest AI Model Just Went Free
- Absolutely No Goddamn AI."
- One AI Model Just Merged Three Jobs Into One
- If You Cut Documentaries For A Living, Watch This
- Stop Downloading Every New AI Tool
- A 15-Year Producer Just Said The Quiet Part
- Everything You Think You Know About AI And Stolen Work Is Wrong
- Everything You Think You Know About Gen Z And AI Is Wrong
- Did You Know YouTube Just Deleted 16 Channels For This?
- 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Touched This
- Hey VFX Artists, You Need This
- I Can't Believe What Google Just Shipped
- Netflix Just Put A Real Number On AI
- An AI Agent That Works While You Sleep
- Hollywood Just Flipped On AIIn an interview this week (promoting the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art), Lucas said AI "means it's much easier for us to make movies" and dismissed skeptics: "There's nothing you...
- Google Just Delayed Its Biggest AI Launch