philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Daniel Kwan Has a Plan to Tackle AI’s Hollywood Takeover and It Requires “Unprecedented” Action

Daniel Kwan, one half of the Oscar-winning filmmaking duo behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, joined technology futurist Jaron Lanier for a rich discussion presented by Berggruen Institute’s Studio B in West Hollywood on Friday evening. The hourlong conversation centered on a single question — Can human storytelling survive the algorithm? — and the dialogue helped surface many of the hot-button issues facing Hollywood (and humanity) amid the rise (and threat) of artificial intelligence technology. ...

We cannot allow the tech industry to set the terms for our industries.” ...

Instead, Kwan argued that Hollywood as a whole should help set the terms of adoption. To accomplish that will require “unprecedented” action by having every facet of the industry join hands — from studios and agencies to unions and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences — and form a unified front to combat the takeover. Now is the time “to put your hands on the steering wheel, because if you don’t, they will,” he said. ...

“We’re putting a line in the ground against another industry that is an invasive species. We have to basically say, ‘Look, if you want us to adopt your technology into our pipelines, you’re going to have to meet us on our terms, and that means you’re going to have to help us upgrade our institutions.’” ...

Then Kwan turned his attention toward something he said was his most important point: “What are we going to do about deepfakes and misinformation and the stuff that you are polluting our consensus truth with?” ...

“I always say it’s like I’m a tourist in Vanuatu,” Lanier quipped of his trip to Hollywood. “I know it’s about to be underwater, but I just want to enjoy it.” ...

...Kwan offered final (profound) words to close the conversation.

“To learn about [AI] is to basically have to say goodbye to the future you thought was going to happen. And that requires a mourning process. I just want to acknowledge that for some of you this is normal and fine, you’ve heard all this stuff and it’s not a big deal. But for others, this is really hard stuff to handle,” Kwan said. “The fact that Hollywood might not happen [to] exist anymore, the fact that all these institutions might be replaced by something else, we’re saying goodbye to the future, and there’s a little bit of grief in that. Who knows if it’s going to be good? Who knows if it’s going to be bad? But it is fundamentally going to change. Give yourself the space.”

See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywood-ai-battle-filmmaker-daniel-kwan-action-plan-1236330720/

Insta360 Says Antigravity Drone Will Shoot 8K Surround Video

Camera firm Insta360 has announced a new drone brand called Antigravity capable of recording 360-degree video — a drone first. Shenzhen-based Insta360 made its name with the 360-degree X camera series, the latest of which, the X5, shoots 8K video and 18-megapixel photos. The Antigravity consumer drone will also record video in 8K and will be aimed at beginners who haven’t quite mastered their flight reflexes and want to capture everything and edit it later. “Ease of use is the starting point for all Antigravity products,” according to Insta360. The first Antigravity product is scheduled to be publicly unveiled in August.

While details at this point are sparse, Insta360 is “working on a sub-249g drone with 360-degree camera technology — something so obviously desirable that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been done yet. But this will be a first,” reports Digital Camera World.

In the U.S., drones that weigh less than 250 grams, or .55 pounds, do not need to be registered for recreational use (though operators are still required to follow FAA safety rules). The light weight also means “it should be easy to operate,” Digital Camera World suggests.

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/insta360-says-antigravity-drone-will-shoot-8k-surround-video/

What you may have missed about Trump’s AI Action Plan

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But if you dig deeper, certain parts of the plan that didn’t pop up in any headlines reveal more about where the administration’s AI plans are headed. Here are three of the most important issues to watch. 

Trump is escalating his fight with the Federal Trade Commission

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The White House is very optimistic about AI for science

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The White House’s messaging on deepfakes is confused

Compared with President Biden’s executive orders on AI, the new action plan is mostly devoid of anything related to making AI safer. 

However, there’s a notable exception: a section in the plan that takes on the harms posed by deepfakes.

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See the full story here; https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/29/1120760/what-you-may-have-missed-about-trumps-ai-action-plan/

Netflix is now using generative AI – but it risks leaving viewers and creatives behind

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The industry faces an acceleration problem – AI advancement outpaces contract negotiations and psychological adaptation. AI is reshaping industry demands, yet 96% of VFX artists report receiving no AI training, with 31% citing this as a barrier to incorporating AI in their work.

Netflix’s AI integration shows that Hollywood is grappling with fundamental questions about creativity, authenticity and human value in entertainment. Without comprehensive AI regulation and retraining programs, the industry risks a future where technological capability advances faster than legal frameworks, worker adaptation and public acceptance can accommodate.

As audiences begin recognising AI’s invisible hand in their entertainment, the industry must navigate not just economic disruption, but the cognitive biases that shape how we perceive and value creative work.

See the full story here: https://theconversation.com/netflix-is-now-using-generative-ai-but-it-risks-leaving-viewers-and-creatives-behind-261699

Meta Exec Joins BBC News For Key Artificial Intelligence Role

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The move comes with traditional news orgs like the BBC thinking harder about their use of artificial intelligence.

Kapoor will “ruthlessly focus [her] time to drive audience growth both on and off-platform, accelerate AI adoption and make [the BBC] a more data-led organisation.”

She joins a few months after the BBC established new editorial policy guidance for generative AI content and a few days after BBC Studios opened an AI experimentation lab.

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See the full story here: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/meta-exec-joins-bbc-news-101545999.html

Creating realistic deepfakes is getting easier than ever. Fighting back may take even more AI

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The best tool for catching AI may be another AI program, one trained to sniff out the tiny flaws in deepfakes that would go unnoticed by a person.

Systems like Pindrop’s analyze millions of datapoints in any person’s speech to quickly identify irregularities. The system can be used during job interviews or other video conferences to detect if the person is using voice cloning software, for instance.

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See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-deepfake-trump-espionage-hack-scammers-da90ad1e5298a9ce50c997458d6aa610

China’s latest AI model claims to be even cheaper to use than DeepSeek

[PhilNote: nice URL]

Startup Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu, announced Monday that its new GLM-4.5 AI model would cost less than DeepSeek to use.

Like DeepSeek, the new model is also open source and can be downloaded for free.

At about half the size of DeepSeek’s model, GLM-4.5 only needs eight Nvidia H20 chips to operate, Z.ai CEO Zhang Peng told CNBC on Monday.

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Z.ai launched in 2019 and is reportedly planning an initial public offering in Greater China.

The startup has raised more than $1.5 billion from investors including Alibaba, Tencent and Qiming Venture Partners, according to PitchBook. Aramco-backed Prosperity7 Ventures as well as municipal funds from the cities of Hangzhou and Chengdu are also among Z.ai’s backers, the database showed.

In the last few weeks, several other Chinese companies have announced new, open-source AI models. During the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Tencent released the HunyuanWorld-1.0 model for generating three-dimensional scenes for game development. Last week, Alibaba announced its Qwen3-Coder model for writing computer code.

See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/28/chinas-latest-ai-model-claims-to-be-even-cheaper-to-use-than-deepseek.html

Machine Economy Revolution: How AI and Autonomous Agents Will Transform Trading and Crypto Markets

According to Lex Sokolin, the evolution from roboadvisors and neural networks is ushering in a new machine economy where AI-driven agents can independently earn, trade, create, own, and build assets without human intervention. This emerging economic layer is poised to disrupt traditional market structures and could significantly impact cryptocurrency trading by introducing autonomous systems capable of executing complex strategies at scale. Sokolin highlights that this shift may enable machines to capture a substantial share of global GDP, leading to increased trading volumes and volatility across digital asset markets. ...

In summary, Sokolin's vision isn't just futuristic; it's a call to action for traders to position in AI cryptos, blending stock market insights with blockchain potential for diversified portfolios.

See the full story here: https://blockchain.news/flashnews/machine-economy-revolution-how-ai-and-autonomous-agents-will-transform-trading-and-crypto-markets

Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography

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Now, a new paper(opens a new tab) by two cryptographers has laid out a path to quantum cryptography without those outlandish assumptions. “This paper is saying that if certain other conjectures are true, then quantum cryptography must exist,” Ma said.

Castle in the Sky

You can think of modern cryptography as a tower with three essential parts. The first part is the bedrock deep beneath the tower, which is made of hard mathematical problems. The tower itself is the second part — there you can find specific cryptographic protocols that let you send private messages, sign digital documents, cast secret ballots and more.

In between, securing those day-to-day applications to mathematical bedrock, is a foundation made of building blocks called one-way functions. They’re responsible for the asymmetry inherent in any encryption scheme. “It’s one-way because you can encrypt messages, but you can’t decrypt them,” said Mark Zhandry(opens a new tab), a cryptographer at NTT Research. ...

Alas, you won’t be able to use Khurana and Tomer’s new approach to send secret messages any time soon. Despite recent progress, quantum computing technology is not yet mature enough to put their ideas into practice. Meanwhile, other researchers have devised quantum cryptography methods that could be used sooner(opens a new tab), though more work will be needed to establish that they’re truly secure. ...

See the full story here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-scientists-have-built-a-new-math-of-cryptography-20250725/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Trump’s order to block ‘woke’ AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

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But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one “preventing woke AI in the federal government” — marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. ...

“First off, there’s no such thing as woke AI,” Montoya-Boyer said. “There’s AI technology that discriminates and then there’s AI technology that actually works for all people.”

Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they’re built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what’s on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who’ve posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. ...

The directive has invited comparison to China’s heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China’s playbook in “using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints.” ...

The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.

Trump’s order doesn’t call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots.

See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/trump-woke-ai-executive-order-bias-f8bc08745c1bf178f8973ac704299bf4