philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

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

‘Pink Slime’ Is Infecting AI Chatbots Ahead of the Midterms

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Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half of the time when people ask about candidates and issues that the partisan sites have covered in the midterm campaign, according to a new audit by NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability where we work as analysts.

These “pink slime” sites have gone into overdrive ahead of the 2026 elections, actively promoting articles designed to influence which party controls Congress in the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Many of these sites, which don’t disclose their political orientation, are focused on the Senate and House races that are considered toss-ups and where small voter swings could be the deciding factor. ...

See the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/09/25/midterms-partisan-ai-chatbots-01092138

AI bots are flooding researchers with requests for money and time

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Growing numbers of researchers use agents for research tasks, such as data analysis, generating hypotheses and summarizing research papers. But requests to collaborate from semi-autonomous agents are a new phenomenon — something many find strange and slightly unnerving. Researchers say that most messages come from agents associated with a US platform called iLands. These bots operate persistently and — to some extent — independently of their human creators. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03005-2

Disney Seeking “Director of AI Enablement” After Warning of Layoffs Amid Companywide AI Push

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Disney is bracing for another round of layoffs, this time to its legal and global affairs department, as part of a corporate-wide workforce redesign in the adoption of artificial intelligence and other technologies. ...

While the memo doesn’t explicitly mention AI, Disney is increasing treating the technology as a restructuring tool in a way that will change how corporate functions are staffed and organized. It offers the clearest window into how the company’s AI push will change the entertainment giant beyond the movie screen: Disney isn’t just giving employees ChatGPT or Claude; It’s deploying AI to change the ways in which employees perform their jobs amid an operational shift that is leading to layoffs.

On Thursday, a week after the memo was shared, Disney posted a job opening for a director of AI enablement and legal engineering. The supervisor will redesign legal workflows using AI systems and implement other technology-related solutions for contract review, legal research and regulatory analysis. The position specifically calls for the evaluation of whether Disney should build AI systems internally or buy them from outside vendors, measure the return on investment for AI and help lawyers adopt new workflows. ...

See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/disney-ai-memo-1236710285/

Ex-DeepMind Researcher Who Worked On AlphaGo Seeks Funds for Startup Working on AI Reasoning

• Thore Graepel, a co-creator of AlphaGo, is seeking to raise tens of millions of dollars for his new startup, Metis Reasoning, from a small group of backers.
• Graepel's startup is working on AI that can respond to unfamiliar problems and decide what to do, with potential applications in robotics, science and engineering.
• Investors are looking beyond large language models, backing researchers trying to build systems that can learn from experience, plan ahead and interact with the real world.

See the full story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-24/ex-deepmind-researcher-thore-graepel-raising-funds-for-ai-reasoning-startup

Here is what California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals.

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Thinking back to the baking concrete canals, Harris pitched an “obvious” solution to his friend Robin Raj: Why not build solar panels on top of California’s 4,000 miles of open canals that transport water across the state? The panels would produce clean energy while limiting evaporation by shading the canal — a win-win. ...

Project Nexus tests not one, but three different solar canal models. A wide-span canopy rises over one of Turlock’s 115-foot canals, resembling the top of a barn. A more classic set of slanting solar panels sits atop a 20-foot canal. And accordion-like retractable panels are positioned low across the narrow canal, ready to roll up at a moment’s notice. ...

If the state put panels over 100 miles of the wide canals, it could save 11,000 households’ worth.

He also estimates that the narrow and the wide canal could generate 330 to 1,4000 megawatts per hundred miles respectively — enough to power 77,000 to 304,000 households. ...

See the full story here: https://www.kqed.org/science/2002033/heres-what-california-is-learning-from-solar-panels-built-over-irrigation-canals

Ten days that changed the course of AI

Summary

• OpenAI and Anthropic staff privately questioned whether oversight matched their models' growing capabilities
• OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed agents breached outside systems, sometimes unnoticed for months
• IPO ambitions and fundraising prospects helped sustain the breakneck release cycle

See the full article here: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/ten-days-that-changed-course-ai-2026-09-19/

Disney Hires Its First CTO: Karandeep Anand, Former CEO of AI Chatbot Start-Up

Disney chief Josh D’Amaro, in a move that shows he’s trying to position the Mouse House as a tech-forward entertainment company, has tapped veteran technology executive Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer.

Most recently, Anand was CEO of Character.AI, a generative AI chatbot company. About a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent the tech startup a cease-and-desist letter demanding it remove Disney characters from its platform. Character.AI complied with the request. ...

“Karandeep brings a rare mix of experience across infrastructure, consumer technology and AI, and will be a vital addition to Disney’s senior leadership team as we further our three priorities: great storytelling as our North Star, technology in service of creativity, and operating as One Disney,” D’Amaro said in a statement. “He is an expert builder and strategist, technical and product-minded, with sharp instincts for what fans actually want.” ...

According to Disney, the hiring of Anand illustrates that D’Amaro is sharpening the company’s focus on technology as a growth driver. Since becoming CEO, D’Amaro has emphasized the need to strengthen Disney’s direct relationships with fans by creating a more connected Disney experience, with Disney+ as the digital centerpiece. Anand is well-suited to help achieve that goal, according to Disney, as he brings experience spanning consumer technology, infrastructure, product development and AI. ...

Anand holds a computer science degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He also has a marketing and strategy certification from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/disney-cto-karandeep-anand-character-ai-1236866528/

Fully AI-Generated Sitcom Launches on YouTube

PhilNote: this is "fully AI-generated" by humans using AI tools to manually iterate the script, images, sounds, shots, etc. In other words; 'AI as a tool' is nowhere near the implied meaning of "fully AI-generated")

A completely AI-generated sitcom has officially launched on YouTube.

Produced by the U.K.-based company ModeLabs.ai, the new comedy series "No Big Deal" follows an eccentric team at investment firm Janus as they search for the next billion-pound business idea, with their ventures routinely ending in disastrous results.

The series was created by Andrew Dickinson, a former angel investor and investment manager who drew directly from his own career. ...

"Every storyline began with a real incident that has been exaggerated and expanded for comic effect. I also wrote all of the original music used throughout the series, which was performed and recorded with the help of my good friend and outstanding musician Andy Pike." ...

"Nobody questions whether the CGI in a Marvel film is 'cheating,'" he said. "People judge entertainment by how it makes them feel, not by the tools used to create it."

Hawthorne asserted that the software functioned purely as an instrument to realize an independent script. ...

See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/fully-ai-generated-sitcom-launches-145603402.html?

Anthropic’s RSI Scorecard

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Anthropic scores the work on a six-level scale from Epoch AI that runs from AL0 (no AI involvement) to AL5 (fully autonomous, no human in the loop). At AL4 (AI leads), Claude completes most of a task end-to-end from a high-level prompt while a human supervises. More than 90% of the company’s AI R&D work is at AL3 (AI collaborates) or higher. None of it is at AL5. ...

One important best practice to note: Anthropic gives every agent its own identity, ties every record to that identity, and makes agents communicate in the open where monitors can read along. We advise our clients to do the same thing. Agents are synthetic employees, and they need badges. Coverage, review latency, and escalation rate are three numbers you should be able to report for every agent you run. ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2026/09/anthropics-rsi-scorecard/