philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

When AI replaces our dead loved ones, what’s next?

• Contemporary plays use AI as a lens to explore eternal questions about humanity, examining what happens when deceased loved ones are re-created digitally.
• “anthropology” and “Marjorie Prime” feature AI replicas that force characters to confront whether humans are just compilations of memories or emails and internet history.
• Theater proves an ideal medium for these explorations, using living performers to examine how technology is deconstructing our understanding of personhood.

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-10-20/theater-what-makes-us-human-playwrights-ai-anthropology-marjorie-prime

Adobe Launches AI Foundry for Enterprise-Grade Custom Models

... Now, a company can have its own (private) version of Adobe Firefly that understands its products, colors, logos, and tone of voice. Every image, video, or design the model generates is brand-safe, legally clear, and ready for commercial use. Adobe says the models stay private to each client and include built-in content-tracking metadata for IP protection.

AI Foundry solves the “we’re not allowed to use public AI tools” problem.  ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/10/adobe-launches-ai-foundry-for-enterprise-grade-custom-models/

Innovation at the Speed of AI

Governor Christopher J. Waller, Federal Reserve System Board of Governors

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I will focus on three aspects of major technological change that "repeat" through history. First, technological change is a constant in our lives, and it is almost always disruptive. It upends the way we work and socialize. Second, it alters existing power relationships in unsettling ways. Finally, technological change reliably raises productivity and our standard of living while improving the quality of our lives. My intent is to describe how AI is likely to affect our lives along these lines and how it differs from past technological changes. ...

Those who collected economic rents, or excess payments, from the control of power will lose those rents. But this will improve our lives in the process.

Whenever a new technology emerges, the first question economists get is about jobs: Will this replace people or make them more productive? The challenge is that, with innovation, there is often a time inconsistency between the costs and the benefits. The disruptions come first; the benefits take time. ...

History shows that adaptation, not avoidance, is what sustains progress. Each wave of technology has disrupted industries and employment, but over time it has also lifted productivity, raised real incomes, and improved living standards. ...

See the full speech here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/waller20251015a.htm

Hollywood turns to K Street as AI threatens their livelihoods

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The latest sign of the seriousness came when famed talent agency Creative Artists Agency retained Washington lobbying shop Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

CAA, which represents some of the biggest stars in music, movies, TV, sports, social media and fashion, in addition to the world’s most iconic brands, tapped the heavyweight firm in mid-September to lobby on artificial intelligence and other issues related to the entertainment industry, according to disclosures this month.

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There’s “no question that the risks and rewards created by AI are prompting more engagement in D.C. than I’ve seen in over a decade,” ...

Trump’s pressure campaign on major media companies is another cause for Hollywood concern.  ...

This month, OpenAI unveiled a new AI video tool that generates content using copyrighted characters from film and TV, eliciting swift blowback from studios and talent managers.

Charles Rivkin, the chief executive of the Motion Picture Association, which represents leading studios in Washington, demanded that OpenAI “take immediate and decisive action to address this issue.” ...

In a statement, the agency mused whether OpenAI believes it can “just steal” artists’ work, “disregarding global copyright principles and blatantly dismissing creators’ rights, as well as the many people and companies who fund the production, creation, and publication of these humans’ work.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/15/hollywood-lobbying-firms-ai-threat-00608521

Nano Banana AI Image Tool Is Added to Search, NotebookLM

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“The buzz about Google’s Nano Banana hasn’t stopped since its release,” per Tom’s Guide, conceding that “the popularity of Sora 2,” which OpenAI released September 30, may have stolen some of its thunder. (And Microsoft’s MAI-Image-1, now in pre-release, is teed-up to get in on that action.)

Nano Banana is “currently rolling out in English for users in the U.S. and India (with broader language support planned),” says Tom’s, calling it “yet another step toward bridging generative AI with everyday visual tools.”

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/nano-banana-ai-image-tool-is-added-to-search-notebooklm/

I’ve Seen How AI ‘Thinks.’ I Wish Everyone Could.

... In my experience, AI works best when I can touch the guts of the model I’m using, when I can feel around for the training data, visualize the math that gives it its structure and tweak the code that generates its outputs.

Most users of large language models don’t get this opportunity, since AI companies don’t make it easy—or even possible....

Plotting words in a “vector space” makes it possible for an LLM to detect the connections among them: Distance is an easily computable property in a vector space, and closeness encapsulates relationships. ...

A (very simplified) language model would “read” these lines by running through them again and again, each time “hiding” one word from itself and trying to guess how it should fill in the blank. After each pass, the model would assess how far off its guess was from the correct word, tweak its calculations and try again. ...

When we find that, to a model, an angry fruit is really a vegetable, ... . We learn, in short, how the model thinks. ...

For every dollar that AI companies pump into computing power to make their models bigger, why not spend a penny on explaining how those models work? Open up the training data. Make programming “playgrounds” where model parameters can be tweaked. Let us traverse vector space hand-in-hand with our machines.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ive-seen-how-ai-thinks-i-wish-everyone-could-41c81370

Numerous Billionaires Preparing for End of Society

... “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever reportedly once told the OpenAI team, according to the journalist Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI. ...
See the full story here: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/billionaires-preparing-for-end

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ask families to join fight against predatory social media policies

 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle urged parents to stand against social media companies that they said prey upon children with exploitative algorithms as the “explosion of unregulated artificial intelligence” adds to their concerns that technologies' benefits are inseparable from its dangers.

To underscore that point, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex cited research from advocacy group ParentsTogether that found researchers posing as children experienced harmful interactions every five minutes they spent with an artificial intelligence chatbot.

“This wasn’t content created by a third party. These were the companies’ own chatbots working to advance their own depraved internal policies," said Prince Harry at Spring Studios in Manhattan Thursday night as he and Markle were named Humanitarians of the Year by the nonprofit Project Healthy Minds. "But here’s what gives us hope: these families aren’t facing this alone.” ...

See the full story here: https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/prince-harry-meghan-markle-families-join-fight-predatory-126387673

Harvard Business School Uses AI To Evaluate Students’ Work, Dean Says

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Evaluating homework is just one of the many areas where Datar said HBS is experimenting with AI in the classroom. He pointed to initiatives like Foundry, an AI platform that allows entrepreneurs outside Harvard to access HBS entrepreneurial management content and use it to bolster their ventures.

“By doing so, we create this very wonderful, connected community, matching people, ideas and resources,” he said. “I think as we continue to build out Foundry, it’s going to be a huge impact on the world.” ...

HBS administrators who spoke at the talk said that the school is also using the technology to condense student feedback submitted to the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning into “actionable insights” for professors.

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“Nothing replaces our classroom experience here — the chalkboards, the sound, the faculty experience,” Negri said. “Learners learn in a lot of different ways, and sometimes at different times of night. So at least one of the ways that AI complements teaching and learning here is being always available 24/7.”

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See the full story here: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/2/hbs-dean-ai-use/

Kiss reality goodbye: AI-generated social media has arrived

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"You can create insanely real looking videos, with your friends saying things that they would never say," said Solomon Messing, an associate professor at New York University in the Center for Social Media and Politics. "I think we might be in the era where seeing is not believing."

Deepfake TikTok

The Sora 2 app looks and feels remarkably like other vertical video social media apps like TikTok. It comes with a few different settings– it's possible to choose videos by mood, for example. Users are allowed control over how their face is in used "end-to-end" in AI-generated videos, according to OpenAI. That means users can allow their faces to be used by everyone, a small circle of friends, or only themselves. What's more, they are allowed to remove videos showing their likeness at any time.

Sora also comes with ways to identify its content as AI-generated. Videos downloaded from the app contain moving watermarks bearing the Sora logo, and the files have embedded metadata that identifies them as AI-made, according to the company.

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But NPR's brief time using the app found that the guardrails appeared to be somewhat loose around Sora. ... a quick review of content shows that Sora is being used to generate an enormous volume of videos depicting trademarked brands and copyrighted material. ...

OpenAI told NPR that it was aware of the use of copyrighted material in Sora but felt it was giving its users more freedom by allowing it. ...

See the full story here: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/03/nx-s1-5560200/openai-sora-social-media