How Culver City is quietly emerging as a new mecca for AI filmmaking
- Culver City’s mix of Hollywood studios, tech companies and available office space is drawing a growing cluster of AI filmmaking startups eager to reshape the industry.
- The companies tout new creative possibilities, using generative tools for everything from short-form crime shows to commercials and film effects.
- But unions and many Hollywood workers fear AI will take jobs, even as studios explore hybrid productions and secure protections against fully synthetic performers.
... The open space in Culver Steps typically hosts community events and movie nights. But on Wednesday, it turned into a job fair for companies looking to hire talent for AI studios. ...
The new wave of AI filmmakers have accepted the rise of AI as inevitable, and are forging ahead, increasingly in Culver City...."
Of course the government should regulate AI, but not the way the AI industry prefers
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Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, also rejects the industry’s position that existing laws don’t apply to its technology: “Policymakers should look to laws already on the books, not to the online manifestoes and blog posts written by tech chief executives, for guidance,” Khan wrote in a recent op-ed.
“Much of the commentary from the executives suggests they currently operate in a legal vacuum, as if A.I. has wiped clean the regulatory map. In fact, their business practices — including how they develop and deploy their technologies — are already subject to longstanding laws,” including product liability and tort law.
She’s right. The subtext of much of the industry’s palaver about the need for new regulations is that AI is so new-fangled that the old rules don’t apply. But they do, and enforcing them should be start of keeping AI’s dangers under control.
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-10-13/of-course-government-should-regulate-ai-but-not-the-way-the-ai-industry-prefers
From killer-robot protests to tech talks for seniors, S.F. Bay Area residents wrestle with AI
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In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed several bills to make AI safer for children and workers. He also issued an executive order to speed up the development of safeguards, including a “kill switch” in case humans lose control of AI.
“AI should expand opportunity — not come at the expense of workers and families,” Newsom said last month in a statement. ...
“I believe that the future, if we get this right, can be much more like a new renaissance than a new industrial revolution,” he said on stage. “AI should be about giving people more power over their own lives, more tools to create, learn, discover, expand knowledge.” ...
Lucas Lu walked by the protest, guiding two black-and-white humanoid robots. His employer rents out the robots for events such as OpenAI’s conference. He led them away from the vocal crowd. ...
“That’s your decision in regard to whether or not you use it,” said Norman Weekes, the AI literacy educator and entrepreneur who presented the topic to the group. “If you never use AI, that’s great, but you should understand it because ... it’s going to affect people you love, if not yourself.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-10-08/at-epicenter-of-ai-san-francisco-bay-residents-take-on-technology
Who Pays When the Agent Goes Rogue
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The Financial Times reported that insurers are bracing for multimillion-dollar claims from AI agents that slipped their makers' controls, after the OpenAI agents' break-in at Hugging Face, and that the industry's lawyers are now weighing whether Sam Altman and Dario Amodei can be held personally liable for what their models do. Aon reviewed more than 300 AI-related legal cases and found that claims could land on policies covering crime, intellectual property, media liability, cyber and tech errors and omissions. The policy in question is directors and officers coverage, which protects executives sued over their decisions. Tim Rayner, Verisk's UK head of underwriting and claims, put it plainly: "Ultimately, the OpenAI CEO is liable, because there's an absence of control in their business. So from a directors' and officers' perspective, it would come back to him." ...
The lawyers in the FT story agree on one point: none of this has been tested in court. Aon's Kevin Kalinich says a claim against an AI chief executive would turn on whether the executive used "reasonable business judgment" in what the company said about its products. Hiscox chief executive Aki Hussain says it is too soon to know how American courts will treat any of it: "It's the US," so a claim "could be under anything." ...
See the full post here: https://shellypalmer.com/2026/10/who-pays-when-the-agent-goes-rogue/
People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?
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More than a third of adults across all 38 OECD countries (a group of the world’s wealthiest democracies) report having used generative AI tools in the last three months.
All these surveys paint a picture of two contradictory truths: A lot of people really do not like AI and a lot of people cannot get enough of it. What’s going on? ...
It’s also possible that the more people use AI, the more negative their opinions about it will be. There’s at least a correlation to back this up: The Global North, where adoption is highest, skews pessimistic. In the Global South, where adoption levels are lower, people are more optimistic.
But here’s what I really think is going on: When people say they hate AI it’s not the technology they dislike but, rather, the relentless drive of the companies behind it to push the tech upon us in as many ways as possible. They’re telling us to brace for the biggest social and economic upheaval in generations. How do they expect people to feel? ....
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/author/will-douglas-heaven/
Sand Gods and Meat Proxies
... We are all becoming meat proxies, the physical and legal embodiment of activities increasingly conceived, mediated, summarized, negotiated, and documented by AI.
AI platforms already have a slang term too. The AI tech bros call them “sand gods.” ...
In a very short time from now, machines will perform a remarkable amount of the knowledge work, while a human remains legally, socially, and economically responsible for an inhuman volume and velocity of interactions. ...
It takes a special kind of narcissism to believe that you can enslave a god, ...
‘The currency of success is shifting under our feet,’ says Wharton organizational psychologist
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Pre-AI, what was rewarded and valued and promoted was how much information you had in your head; we’re now in an environment where information is a commodity. So the differentiating skill set or capability is: Can you recognize patterns? Can you synthesize lots of disparate pieces of information? Can you figure out what perspectives are credible and which ones aren’t?
All of that is a long way of saying that human judgment is going to supersede human expertise. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/the-new-ways-to-thrive-at-work-now-according-to-adam-grant-4d3ad022
Why are AI Filmmaking Companies Moving Culver City Los Angeles?
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In the last six months, multiple AI companies have been moving to Culver City and opening large offices. This summer a cohort of companies representing over $2 billion in venture capital have set up shop in Culver City. This influx of companies includes both labs creating products and studios creating films and shows. ...
As attendees start to associate AI on the Lot as "South by Southwest for Culver City", we've realized that college students graduating into the job marketplace are seeing Culver City as synonymous with "the AI media industry". ...
The landscape of AI media is still forming, so it's too early to make any definitive claims. But as the industry develops, don't ignore what's happening in Culver City.
See the full story here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/capital-ai-media-culver-city-ai-on-the-lot-ybibc/
Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
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It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect. ...
Quietly, Mr. Olah and his team at Anthropic have been on a frantic and high stakes quest to understand the A.I. models they have unleashed on the world and to convince the models to abide by a moral code that will protect humanity.
To do that, Mr. Olah began reaching out last fall to religious thinkers from different faiths. What followed was an extensive series of confidential meetings, calls and discussions — many of them revealed here for the first time — where many participants were required to sign N.D.A.s preventing them from revealing any of Anthropic’s unpublished research. ...
Anthropic talks about Claude in more humanistic terms than its competitors discuss their models. Last year, the company announced that it believed that the models showed signs of introspection and could plan ahead. ...
I have spent my career exploring what people believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I listened, it became clear that Anthropic’s interest in the world of faith was about more than training its technology. Rather, the company was sharing a new kind of creation story — one that raises profound questions about the nature of the human spirit and the future of humanity. ...
The result, released in January, was a new “constitution” for Claude, an 84-page document written for Claude that the company said outlined “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be” and “the values we would like Claude to embody.” It operates as a foundational moral text to guide Claude’s behavior.
Instead of having the models follow a specific list of rules, the constitution focuses on developing the models’ overall character, informing the way they make decisions. ...
The constitution, Anthropic decided, was not enough to ensure Claude acted responsibly. Like humans, the models needed to learn to cultivate virtue.
Mr. Olah wanted to see what his team could learn from human morality that it could apply to the models — a process he calls “moral formation.”
“How do you help them be stable? How do you help them to mature? How do you help them be, you know, deeply moral?” Mr. Olah said. ...
For humans, morality has rarely depended on simply following rules. Communities also shape morality. Values are inherited and imparted over time, learned as we live together in our bodies in the physical world. But A.I. models have no bodies. And Anthropic was aiming to make them embrace morality in a matter of months, as fears intensified of their accelerating power and inability to be controlled. ...
He also said that regardless of whether Claude was an entity that deserved moral care, the way humans treated Claude could be important as it could affect how Claude behaved. ...
Mr. Olah and his team spent hours making the case for their A.I. models. They described Claude’s “feelings” and how they tracked what they called “emotional vectors” — what they described as artificial neurons that activate responses like love, anger, fear and sadness.
Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an A.I. model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group. ...
A key part of the presentation, participants said, was what Anthropic called the model’s “persona selection,” about how to get Claude to see itself as a virtuous actor. The company argued that how people treated Claude could affect how Claude treated people. ...
After one discussion, Mr. Olah grew excited when a participant brought up the idea of having models confess, much like the Catholic sacrament of confession. Mr. Olah saw value not just in a model alerting when it had done something bad, but also in how the act of confession could shape the model’s sense of itself and thus its choices.
“The kind of character who confesses, that has an effect on character as well, right?” he told me. ...
“The whole convening should have happened at the design stage,” she said. “All the companies should have done that. We are now reverse engineering the ethics.” ...
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” Leo wrote. Calling for the “moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of A.I. with human values” should require a shared understanding of the ethics involved.
“Otherwise, those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems,” Leo said. ...
When his turn on the pope’s stage came, Mr. Olah acknowledged that every frontier A.I. lab, including Anthropic, had business incentives that conflicted with moral behavior. He urged outside voices like the Vatican to hold them accountable and to speak out on A.I.’s impact on the poor and on human flourishing, two issues of widespread concern.
The world saw a shared stand for a human future. But Mr. Olah subtly made another case, too.
“I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.” ...
Anthropic held another convening this month that included religious thinkers, according to three participants. An Anthropic spokeswoman said that the meeting focused more broadly on human flourishingand that the company’s outreach has expanded beyond religious leaders to include others like psychologists and civil society leaders. ...
I asked what Claude would think of the pope’s encyclical. It was, after all, the world’s most significant moral document to date on A.I. Mr. Olah hesitated.
“Things that go on the internet do affect models,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. But Anthropic would not specifically use the document to further train Claude, he said. The strongest influence on Claude would be Anthropic’s own training. ...
See the full story here; https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html
The Pentagon wants $30 million to build an AI-powered lie detector
Polygraph+ will use new sensor technologies and AI to vet staff and hunt leakers. Experts say AI-enabled lie detection is “the worst of both worlds.” ...
Current lie detection technology has barely changed since the polygraph was invented in the 1920s. Examiners rely on blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and sweat measurements to determine if someone is lying. They make judgments about the veracity of respondents’ replies on the basis of differences in their physiological response to baseline questions like “Is the sky blue?” and target questions like “Have you ever committed a crime?”
The federal government conducts tens of thousands of the tests each year while screening employees, but the reliability of this technology has been repeatedly challenged—and its results are rarely admissible in court. ...
“If you know how it works, you can beat it,” says Sophie van der Zee, an associate professor who studies deception at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She says the machine’s biggest effect is deterrence—often, subjects confess before it even begins. “But that only works if people think a polygraph works,” she points out. ...
Three things are happening under the surface that lie detection tries to home in on, van der Zee says: physiological stress, cognitive load, and the conscious efforts people make to conceal the fact that they’re lying. Current polygraph technology tackles only one. ...
Kotsoglou says combining AI and the polygraph is “the worst of both worlds” because it adds uncertainty on top of invalidity. Even if AI or machine learning can spot previously unseen patterns in physiological data, it won’t be able to reliably link them to lying because there is no real ground truth. ...
“It seems very much a response to the concern of the current administration to leaks and perceived lack of loyalty,” says Oswald. “[Lie detection is] being used as a threat, to intimidate and force people to confess to things, as opposed to anything that's actually getting valid information.”
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/25/1145144/pentagon-ai-lie-detector
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