‘You can make really good stuff – fast': new AI tools a gamechanger for film-makers
To the uninitiated viewer, this could be a cinematic retelling of a geopolitical crisis that unfolded barely weeks ago – hastily shot on location, somewhere in the Middle East.
However, despite its polished production look, it wasn't shot anywhere, there is no location, and the woman feeding stray cats is no actor – she doesn't exist.
The engrossing footage is the 'rough cut' of a 12-minute short film about last month's US attack on Iranian nuclear sites, made by the directors Samir Mallal and Bouha Kazmi. It is also made entirely by artificial intelligence.
The clip is based on a detail the film-makers read in news coverage of the US bombings – a woman who walked the empty streets of Tehran feeding stray cats. Armed with the information, they have been able to make a sequence that looks as if it could have been created by a Hollywood director.
The impressive speed and, for some, worrying ease with which films of this kind can be made has not been lost on broadcasting experts.
Last week Richard Osman, the TV producer and bestselling author, said that an era of entertainment industry history had ended and a new one had begun – all because Google has released a new AI video making tool used by Mallal and others.
'So I saw this thing and I thought, 'well, OK that's the end of one part of entertainment history and the beginning of another',' he said on The Rest is Entertainment podcast.
Osman added: 'TikTok, ads, trailers – anything like that – I will say will be majority AI-assisted by 2027.'
For Mallal, an award-winning London-based documentary maker who has made adverts for Samsung and Coca-Cola, AI has provided him with a new format – 'cinematic news'.
The Tehran film, called Midnight Drop, is a follow-up to Spiders in the Sky, a recreation of a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian bombers in June.
Within two weeks, Mallal, who directed Spiders in the Sky on his own, was able to make a film about the Ukraine attack that would have cost millions – and would have taken at least two years including development – to make pre-AI.
'Using AI, it should be possible to make things that we've never seen before,' he said. 'We've never seen a cinematic news piece before turned around in two weeks. We've never seen a thriller based on the news made in two weeks.'
Spiders in the Sky was largely made with Veo3, an AI video generation model developed by Google, and other AI tools. The voiceover, script and music were not created by AI, although ChatGPT helped Mallal edit a lengthy interview with a drone operator that formed the film's narrative spine.
Google's film-making tool, Flow, is powered by Veo3. It also creates speech, sound effects and background noise. Since its release in May, the impact of the tool on YouTube – also owned by Google – and social media in general has been marked. As Marina Hyde, Osman's podcast partner, said last week: 'The proliferation is extraordinary.'
Quite a lot of it is 'slop' – the term for AI-generated nonsense – although the Olympic diving dogs have a compelling quality.
Mallal and Kazmi aim to complete the film, which will intercut the Iranian's story with the stealth bomber mission and will be six times the length of Spider's two minutes, in August. It is being made by a mix of models including Veo3, OpenAI's Sora and Midjourney.
'I'm trying to prove a point,' says Mallal. 'Which is that you can make really good stuff at a high level – but fast, at the speed of culture. Hollywood, especially, moves incredibly slowly.'
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He adds: 'The creative process is all about making bad stuff to get to the good stuff. We have the best bad ideas faster. But the process is accelerated with AI.'
Mallal and Kazmi also recently made Atlas, Interrupted, a short film about the 3I/Atlas comet, another recent news event, that has appeared on the BBC.
David Jones, the chief executive of Brandtech Group, an advertising startup using generative AI – the term for tools such as chatbots and video generators – to create marketing campaigns, says the advertising world is about to undergo a revolution due to models such as Veo3.
'Today, less than 1% of all brand content is created using gen AI. It will be 100% that is fully or partly created using gen AI,' he says.
Netflix also revealed last week that it used AI in one of its TV shows for the first time.
However, in the background of this latest surge in AI-spurred creativity lies the issue of copyright. In the UK, the creative industries are furious about government proposals to let models be trained on copyright-protected work without seeking the owner's permission – unless the owner opts out of the process.
Mallal says he wants to see a 'broadly accessible and easy-to-use programme where artists are compensated for their work'.
Beeban Kidron, a cross-bench peer and leading campaigner against the government proposals, says AI film-making tools are 'fantastic' but 'at what point are they going to realise that these tools are literally built on the work of creators?' She adds: 'Creators need equity in the new system or we lose something precious.'
YouTube says its terms and conditions allow Google to use creators' work for making AI models – and denies that all of YouTube's inventory has been used to train its models.
Mallal calls his use of AI to make films 'prompt craft', a phrase that uses the term for giving instructions to AI systems. When making the Ukraine film, he says he was amazed at how quickly a camera angle or lighting tone could be adjusted with a few taps on a keyboard.
'I'm deep into AI. I've learned how to prompt engineer. I've learned how to translate my skills as a director into prompting. But I've never produced anything creative from that. Then Veo3 comes out, and I said, 'OK, finally, we're here.''
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Generations of women have been disfigured': Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery, power, and Hollywood's age problem
I'm scheduled to speak to Jamie Lee Curtis at 2pm UK time, and a few minutes before the allotted slot I dial in via video link, to be met with a vision of the 66-year-old actor sitting alone in a darkened room, staring impassively into the camera. 'Morning,' she says, with comic flatness, as I make a sound of surprise that is definitely not a little scream. Oh, hi!! I say, Are you early or am I late? 'I'm always early,' says the actor, deadpan. 'Or as my elder daughter refers to me, 'aggressively early'.' Curtis is in a plain black top, heavy black-framed glasses and – importantly for this conversation – little or no makeup, while behind her in the gloom, a dog sleeps in a basket. She won't say what part of the US she's in beyond the fact it's a 'witness protection cabin in the woods' where 'I'm trying to have privacy' – an arch way, I assume, of saying she's not in LA – and immediately starts itemising other situations in which she has been known to be early: Hollywood premieres ('They tell me I can't go to the red carpet yet because it's not open and so my driver, Cal, and I drive around and park in the shade'); early-morning text messages ('I wake people up'); even her work schedule: 'I show up, do the work, and then I get the fuck out.' This is the short version; in full, the opening minutes of our conversation involve Curtis free-associating through references to the memory of her mother and stepfather missing her performance in a school musical in Connecticut; the negotiating aims of the makeup artists' union; the nickname by which she would like to be known if she ever becomes a grandmother ('Fifo' – short for 'first in first out'); and what, exactly, her earliness is about. Not, as you might imagine, anxiety, but: 'You know, honestly, I've done enough analysis of all this – it's control.' Curtis knows her early arrivals strike some people as rude. 'My daughter Annie says: 'People aren't ready for you.' And I basically say: 'Well, that's their problem. They should be ready.'' 'That's their problem' is, along with, 'I don't give a shit any more' a classic Curtis expression that goes a long way towards explaining why so many people love her – and they really do love her – a woman who on top of charming us for decades in a clutch of iconic roles, has crossed over, lately, into that paradoxical territory in which she is loved precisely because she's done worrying about what others think of her. Specifically, she doesn't care about the orthodoxies of an industry in which women are shamed into having cosmetic surgery before they hit 30. Curtis has spoken of having a procedure herself at 25, following a comment made on the set of a film that her eyes were 'baggy'. Regretting it, she has in the years since made the genuinely outlandish and inspiring decision to wear her hair grey and eschew surgical tweaks. That Curtis is the child of two Hollywood icons, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and thus an insider since birth, either makes this more surprising or else explains it entirely, but either way, she has become someone who appears to operate outside the usual Hollywood rules. 'I have become quite brusque,' says Curtis, of people making demands on her time when she's not open for business. 'And I have no problem saying: 'Back the fuck off.'' I can believe it. During the course of our conversation, Curtis's attitude – which is broadly charming, occasionally hectoring and appears to be driven by a general and sardonic belligerence – is that of someone pushing back against a lifetime of misconceptions, from which, four months shy of her 67th birthday, she finally feels herself to be free. Curtis is in a glorious phase of her career, one that, despite starring in huge hits – from the Halloween franchise and A Fish Called Wanda (1988) to Trading Places (1983), True Lies (1994) and the superlative Knives Out (2019) – has always eluded her. The fact is, celebrity aside, Curtis has never been considered a particularly heavyweight actor or been A-list in the conventional way. At its most trivial, this has required her to weather small slights, such as being ignored by the Women In Film community, with its tedious schedule of panels and events. ('I still exist outside of Women In Film,' she snaps. 'They're not asking me to their lunch.') And, more broadly, has seen Curtis completely overlooked by the Oscars since she shot Halloween, her first movie, at the age of 19. Well, all that has changed now. In 2023, Curtis won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role as Deirdre Beaubeirdre in the genre-bending movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. That same year, she appeared in a single episode of the multi-award-winning TV show The Bear as Donna Berzatto, the alcoholic mother of a large Italian clan – she calls it 'the most exhilarating creative experience I will ever have'. Anyone who saw this extraordinary performance is still talking about it, and it led to a larger role on the show. Doors that had always been shut to Curtis flew open. For years, she had tried and failed to get movie and TV projects off the ground. Now, she lists the forthcoming projects she had a hand in bringing to the screen: 'Freakier Friday, TV series Scarpetta, survival movie The Lost Bus, four other TV shows and two other movies.' She has become a 'prolific producer', she says, as well as a Hollywood elder and role model. All of which makes Curtis laugh – the fact that, finally, 'at 66, I get to be a boss'. You'd better believe she'll be making the most of it. The movie Curtis and I are ostensibly here to talk about is Freakier Friday, the follow-up to Freaky Friday, the monster Disney hit of 2003 in which Curtis and Lindsay Lohan appeared as a mother and daughter who switch bodies with hilarious consequences. I defy anyone who enjoyed the first film not to feel both infinitely aged by revisiting the cast more than 20 years on, and also not to find it a wildly enjoyable return. The teenage Lohan of the first movie is now a 37-year-old mother of 15-year-old Harper, played by Julia Butters, while the introduction of a second teenager – Harper's mortal enemy Lily, played by Sophia Hammons – allows for a four-way body swap in which Curtis-as-grandma is inhabited by Hammons' British wannabe influencer. If it lacks the simplicity of the first movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to taking my 10-year-old girls when it opens next month. It is also a movie that presented Curtis with an odd set of challenges. She has a problem with 'pretty'. When Curtis herself was a teenager, she says, she was 'cute but not pretty'. She watched both her parents' careers atrophy after their youthful good looks started to wane. Part of her shtick around earliness is an almost existential refusal to live on Hollywood's timeline, because, she says: 'I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age. I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that's very painful.' As a result, says Curtis: 'I have been self-retiring for 30 years. I have been prepping to get out, so that I don't have to suffer the same as my family did. I want to leave the party before I'm no longer invited.' In the movie, Curtis was allowed to keep her grey hair (although it looks shot through with blond) but her trademark pixie cut was replaced with something longer and softer. I take it with a pinch when she says things such as, 'I'm an old lady' and, 'I'm going to die soon' – even in age-hating Hollywood, this seems overegged – but one takes the point that she found the conventional aesthetic demands of Freakier Friday, in which she 'had to look pretty, I had to pay attention to [flattering] lighting, and clothes and hair and makeup and nails', much harder than playing a dishevelled alcoholic in The Bear. On the other hand, Curtis is a pro and, of course, gave Disney the full-throated, zany-but-still-kinda-hot grandma they wanted. (There is a scene in which she tries to explain various board games – Boggle, Parcheesi – to the owl-eyed teens that reminds you just how fine a comic actor she is.) It's the story of how Freakier Friday came about, however, that really gives insight into who Curtis is: an absolute, indefatigable and inveterate hustler. 'I am owning my hustle, now,' she says and is at her most impressive, her most charming and energised when she is talking about the hustle. To wit: Curtis was on a world tour promoting the Halloween franchise that made her name and that enjoyed a hugely successful reboot in 2018, when something about the crowd response struck her. 'In every single city I went to, the only movie they asked me about besides Halloween was Freaky Friday – was there going to be a sequel?' When she got back from the tour, she called Bob Iger, Disney's CEO. 'I said: 'Look, I don't know if you're planning on doing [a sequel], but Lindsay is old enough to have a teenager now, and I'm telling you the market for that movie exists.'' As the project came together, Curtis learned that Disney was planning to release Freakier Friday straight to streaming. 'And I called Bob Iger' – it's at this point you start to imagine Iger seeing Curtis's name flash up on his phone and experiencing a slight drop in spirits – 'and I called David Greenbaum [Disney Live Action president], and I called Asad Ayaz, who's the head of marketing, and I said: 'Guys, I have one word for you: Barbie. If you don't think the audience that saw Barbie is going to be the audience that goes and sees Freakier Friday, you're wrong.'' This is what Curtis means when she refers to herself as 'a marketing person', or 'a weapon of mass promotion', and she has done it for ever. It's what she did in 2002 when she lobbied More magazine to let her pose in her underwear and no makeup – 'They didn't come to me and say: 'Hey Jamie, how about you take off your clothes and show America that you're chubby?' The More magazine thing happened because I said it should happen, and I even titled the piece: True Thighs.' And it is what she was doing a few weeks before our interview when she turned up to the photoshoot in LA bearing a bunch of props she had ordered from Amazon, including oversized plastic lips and a blond wig. Curtis says: 'There are many, many actresses who love the dress up, who love clothes, who love fashion, who love being a model. I. Hate. It. I feel like I am having to wrestle with your idea of me versus my idea of me. Because I've worked hard to establish who I am, and I don't want you to … I have struggled with it my whole life.' Curtis is emphatic that her ideas be accurately interpreted and, before our meeting, sent an email via her publicist explaining her thinking behind the shoot. 'The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I've been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who've disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.' Obviously, the word 'genocide' is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. 'I've used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it's a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there's a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances. And it is aided and abetted by AI, because now the filter face is what people want. I'm not filtered right now. The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it's hard not to go: 'Oh, well that looks better.' But what's better? Better is fake. And there are too many examples – I will not name them – but very recently we have had a big onslaught through media, many of those people.' Well, at the risk of sounding harsh, one of the people implicated by Curtis's criticism is Lindsay Lohan, her Freakier Friday co-star and a woman in her late 30s who has seemingly had a lot of cosmetic procedures at a startlingly young age (though Lohan denies having had surgery). In terms of mentoring Lohan, with whom Curtis remained friends after making the first film, she says: 'I'm bossy, very bossy, but I try to mind my own business. She doesn't need my advice. She's a fully functioning, smart woman, creative person. Privately, she's asked me questions, but nothing that's more than an older friend you might ask.' But given the stridency of Curtis's position on cosmetic surgery, don't younger women feel judged in her presence? Isn't it awkward? 'No. No. Because I don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm not proselytising to them. I would never say a word. I would never say to someone: what have you done? All I know is that it is a never-ending cycle. That, I know. Once you start, you can't stop. But it's not my job to give my opinion; it's none of my business.' As for Lohan, Curtis says: 'I felt tremendous maternal care for Lindsay after the first movie, and continued to feel that. When she'd come to LA, I would see her. She and I have remained friends, and now we're sort of colleagues. I feel less maternal towards her because she's a mommy now herself and doesn't need my maternal care, and has, obviously, a mom – Dina's a terrific grandma.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The general point about the horror of trying to stay young via surgery is sensible and, of course, I agree. At the back of my mind, however, I have a small, pinging reservation that I can't quite put my finger on. I suggest to Curtis that she has natural advantages by virtue of being a movie star, which, on the one hand, of course, makes her more vulnerable around issues of ageing, but on the other hand, she's naturally beautiful and everyone loves her, and most average women who – 'I have short grey hair!' she protests. 'Other women can –' They can, of course! But you must have a physical confidence that falls outside the normal – 'No! No!' She won't have it. 'I feel like you're trying to say: 'You're in some rarefied air, Jamie.'' I'm not! She responds: 'By the way, genetics – you can't fuck with genetics. You want to know where my genetics lie?' She lifts up an arm and wobbles her bingo wings at me. 'Are you kidding me? By the way, you're not going to see a picture of me in a tank top, ever.' This is Curtis's red line. 'I wear long-sleeve shirts; that's just common sense.' She gives me a beady look. 'I challenge you that I'm in some rarefied air.' I think about this afterwards to try and clarify my objection, which I guess is this: that the main reason women in middle age dye their hair is to stave off invisibility, which, with the greatest respect, is not among the veteran movie star's problems. But it's a minor quibble given what I genuinely believe is Curtis's helpful and iconoclastic gesture. And when she talks about cosmetic surgery as addiction, she should know. Curtis was an alcoholic until she got sober at 40 and is emphatic and impressive on this subject, the current poster woman – literally: she's on signs across LA for an addiction charity with the tagline: 'My bravest thing? Getting sober'. I'm curious about how her intense need for control worked, in those years long ago, alongside her addiction? 'I am a controlled addict,' she says. 'In recovery we talk about how, in order to start recovering, you have to hit what you call a 'bottom'. You have to crash and burn, lose yourself and your family and your job and your resources in order to know that the way you were living didn't work. I refer to myself as an Everest bottom; I am the highest bottom I know. When I acknowledged my lack of control, I was in a very controlled state. I lost none of the external aspects of my life. The only thing I had lost was my own sense of myself and self-esteem.' Externally, during those years of addiction, she seemed to be doing very well. Her career boomed. She married Christopher Guest, the actor, screenwriter and director, and they have two children and have stayed married for more than 40 years. (There's no miracle to this. As Curtis puts it, wryly: 'It's just that we have chosen to stay married. And be married people. And we love each other. And I believe we respect each other. And I'm sure there's a little bit of hatred in there, too.') I wonder, then, whether Curtis's success during those years disguised how serious a situation she was in with her addiction? 'There's no one way to be an addict or an alcoholic. People hide things – I was lucky, and I am ambitious, and so I never let that self-medication get in the way of my ambition or work or creativity. It never bled through. No one would ever have said that had been an issue for me.' Where was the cost? 'The external costs are awful for people; but the internal costs are more sinister and deadly, because to understand that you are powerless over something other than your own mind and creativity is something. But that was a long time ago. I'm an old lady now.' She is doing better than ever. With the Oscar under her belt, Curtis has just returned in the new season of The Bear and has a slew of projects – many developed with Jason Blum, the veteran horror producer with whom she has a development deal – coming down the line. Watching her bravura performance as Donna Berzatto, I did wonder if playing an alcoholic had been in any way traumatic. She flashes me a look of pure vehemence. 'Here's what's traumatic: not being able to express your range as an artist. That's traumatic. To spend your entire public life holding back range. And depth. And complexity. And contradiction. And rage. And pain. And sorrow.' She builds momentum: 'And to have been limited to a much smaller palette of creative, emotional work. 'For me, it was an unleashing of 50 years of being a performer who was never considered to have any range. And so the freedom, and the confidence, that I was given by Chris [Storer, the show's creator], and the writing, which leads you … everywhere you need to go – it was exhilarating.' She continues: 'It took no toll. The toll has been 40 years of holding back something I know is here.' Well, there she is, the Curtis who thrills and inspires. Among the many new projects is The Lost Bus, a survival disaster movie for AppleTV+ about a bus full of children trying to escape wildfires. The idea came to Curtis while she was driving on the freeway, listening to an NPR report on the deadly wildfires of 2018 in the small town of Paradise, California. She pulled over and called Blum; the movie, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, drops later this year. For another project, she managed to persuade Patricia Cornwell, the superstar thriller writer, to release the rights for her Scarpetta series, which, as well as producing, Curtis will star in alongside Nicole Kidman. This burst of activity is something Curtis ascribes to the 'freedom' she derived from losing 'all vanity', and over the course of our conversation 'freedom' is the word she most frequently uses to describe what she values in life. Freedom is a particularly loaded and precious concept for those on the other side of addiction and, says Curtis, 'I have dead relatives; I have parents who both had issues with drinking and drugs. I have a dead sibling. I have numerous friends who never found the freedom, which is really the goal – right? Freedom.' It's a principle that also extends to her family. Curtis's daughter Ruby, 29, is trans, and I ask how insulated they are from Donald Trump's aggressively anti-trans policies. 'I want to be careful because I protect my family,' says Curtis. 'I'm an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they are. And if a governmental organisation tries to claim they're not allowed to be who they are, I will fight against that. I'm a John Steinbeck student – he's my favourite writer – and there's a beautiful piece of writing from East of Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion, institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.' There are many, many other subjects to cycle through, including Curtis's friendship with Mariska Hargitay, whose new documentary about her mother, Jayne Mansfield, hit Curtis particularly hard, not least because 'Jayne's house was next to Tony Curtis's house – that big pink house on Carolwood Drive that Tony Curtis lived in and Sonny and Cher owned prior to him.' (I don't know if referring to her dad as 'Tony Curtis,' is intended to charm, but it does.) There's also a school reunion she went to over a decade ago; the feeling she has of being 'a 14-year-old energy bunny'; the fact we've been pronouncing 'Everest' wrong all this time; the role played by lyrics from Justin Timberlake's Like I Love You in her friendship with Lindsay Lohan; and the 'Gordian knot' of what happens when not being a brand becomes your brand. Curtis could, one suspects, summon an infinite stream of enthusiasms and – perhaps no better advertisement for ageing, this – share urgent thoughts about every last one of them. In an industry in which people weigh their words, veil their opinions and pander to every passing ideal, she has gone in a different direction, one unrestrained by the usual timidities. Or as she puts it with her typical take-it-or-leave-it flatness, 'the freedom to have my own mind, wherever it's going to take me. I'm comfortable with that journey and reject the rest.' Freakier Friday is in Australian cinemas from 7 August and from 8 August in the UK and US Jamie Lee Curtis wears: (leopard look) jacket and skirt, by Rixo; T-shirt and belt, both by AllSaints; boots, by Dr Martens; tights, by Wolford; (tartan look) suit, by Vivienne Westwood, from tights, by Wolford; shoes, by By Far. Fashion stylist: Avigail Collins at Forward Artists. Set stylist: Stefania Lucchesi at Saint Luke Artists. Hair: Sean James at Aim Artists. Makeup: Erin Ayanian Monroe at Cloutier Remix.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
How podcast star David Sacks' rise to popular Trump ally started with cigars in back rooms and a strategic $10M purchase
As a group of prominent MAGA influencers and podcasters met at Shelly's Back Room, the smoke-filled cigar bar just a block away from the White House in February, an unassuming white haired man in a tailored suit entered the room. It was David Sacks, Trump's newly anointed artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar. The event, hosted by prominent MAGA figure Mike Cernovich and bitcoin millionaire and entrepreneur Erik Fineman, featured podcaster Tim Pool, who hosted a live recording in one of the side rooms. The group watched as Sacks joined the podcast as he easily chatted with the younger, and less wealthy, hosts as they reflected on the 2024 election over drinks and cigars. Sacks, a billionaire Silicon Valley investor, bet big on President Trump in the Summer of 2024, well aware of stakes if then-President Joe Biden won reelection. His well-attended fundraiser at his mansion that summer in San Francisco sent a signal to Silicon Valley that it was okay to support Trump again, and even cool. Turns out it was a smart bet. Sacks is now one of the president's top advisers, by spearheading a Republican approach to tech policy and attracting a wide fanbase in Washington, DC 'He's incredible. He's been a great member of President Trump's administration and has helped us bring in many new friends to the MAGA movement,' Trump's media advisor and podcast guru Alex Bruesewitz told the Daily Mail about Sacks. Sacks, with his three poker buddies and co-hosts of the popular podcast 'All In,' had already emerged as celebrities in the podcast community as the four 'Besties' grew their show over the past few years. After that summer fundraiser, they hosted Trump on their pod for nearly an hour. The billionaire presidential candidate spoke easily in the forum of friends, joking about their status and wealth and discussed what he would do for the economy and tech industry. Sacks' gamble paid off as Trump appointed him to the administration after the election, putting him in an unprecedented position of influence in the burgeoning new industries. Tech leaders and cryptocurrency moguls celebrated at the exclusive 'Crypto Ball' in January to celebrate Trump's inauguration, as Sacks celebrated the new era of cryptocurrency expansion. 'The reign of terror against crypto is over,' Sacks proclaimed to the cheering crowd. Sack's new role thrust him into an unfamiliar social territory of Washington, DC. He moved quickly to integrate himself into Washington society, purchasing a $10 million property in Northwest DC. Despite his big real estate moves, his calm, unassuming personality serves him well in the city as he has been spotted at the Ned's club near the White House. 'David's super smart. I see him around in DC all the time,' Fineman told the Daily Mail. 'He can kind of blend in. He's a chill guy.' Groups of young DC professionals and staffers typically huddle to ask 'Is that him?' when he enters a room and gradually attracts attention from fans who cautiously approach him for a photo and a quick conversation. In May, Sacks moved to start his own private 'Executive Branch' club in Georgetown, as he explained the podcast he found the clubs in Washington, DC 'kind of old and stuffy.' 'We wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned,' he said. The exclusive club costs as much as $500,000 to join, as Sacks promised it would be free of lobbyists and 'fake news' reporters for elite professionals. But Sacks does not spend his time there exclusively, as he is known to appear at other clubs and events around the city. This week, Sacks successfully celebrated a milestone achievement with the release of the administration's new 28-page AI Action Plan at a summit in Washington, DC, which was co-hosted by the All-in podcast. Sacks, together with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg created the All-In podcast during the coronavirus pandemic, as the quarantined friends started dabbling with the format to recreate the lifestyle they were used to before California locked down. Each host, wealthy tech investors in their own right, exhibit their own unique egos, backgrounds, and ideas on the show. Their political views vary so much that it often leads to dynamic, and at times fraught, conversations that appeal to anyone ranging from MAGA diehards to liberal vegans. The unique podcast formula quickly drew a passionate fan base that grew beyond Silicon Valley, as the four friends banter through issues facing the country and dabble in politics. It re-introduced Trump to their unique audience, demonstrating why it could be a good thing to put the bombastic former president back in the White House. The four friends united over their shared loathing of 'woke' policies that consumed the tech industry, especially censorship and defended the importance of classically liberal values like freedom of speech. At the summit in Washington, the podcast co-hosts interviewed Vice President JD Vance as well as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Department of Interior Doug Burgum President Trump also appeared at the summit to deliver the path forward for artificial intelligence, praising Sacks as a 'smart guy.' 'I did that podcast a year and a half ago and I said, 'This is something.' It was pretty new, pretty raw. Everybody I knew saw that podcast. I said, 'Well, he's got something pretty good. Who is that guy?'' Trump said. The four friends watched as the president prioritized issues they had talked about on their podcast for years, enshrining them into policy positions that will reverberate throughout the industry. 'It's actually very uncool, as somebody told me the other day. It's so uncool to be woke,' Trump said. 'I encourage all American companies to join us in rejecting poisonous Marxism in our technology.' With his wealth, podcast popularity, and newfound political clout, more people know who he is as Sacks has emerged as a significant figures in Washington in just six months. Sacks did not respond to a Daily Mail interview request. 'David Sacks is an incredibly successful businessman and visionary in emerging technologies. His service to the President and dedication to his work here is crucial to ensuring America is prepared to win the AI race and secure our global technological dominance,' White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields told the Daily Mail. Sack's swift success demonstrates a stark contrast to other Silicon Valley geniuses who quickly sour on the bureaucracy and backstabbing in the swamp of Washington. As everyone in Trumpworld knows, success in one position can swiftly lead to future opportunities.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Indian film company to rerelease romantic drama with AI ‘happy ending'
An Indian film company is rereleasing a 2013 romantic drama with an alternate artificial intelligence ending without the involvement of its director, in what could be the first instance of its kind in global cinema. Raanjhanaa, a Hindi-language film about the doomed romance between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, will return to cinemas on 1 August under its Tamil-language title Ambikapathy. The film's original tragic ending will be replaced by a 'happy' one. Pradeep Dwivedi, the chief executive of Eros Media Group, defended its decision, saying technological innovation was part of the company's long-term creative and commercial vision. He said the alteration was an 'exploratory baby step' and confirmed that Eros was 'significantly evaluating' its library of more than 3,000 releases for similar AI treatments. 'If the technology allows us to do something and we can do something good with it, why not?' he said. 'There has to be a symbiotic understanding of what the technology allows, what the creative process can foster, and what the audience accepts.' The rerelease has drawn strong criticism from the film's director, Aanand L Rai, who said he learned of the move through media reports. 'I'm heartbroken that this is the future we're heading toward, where intent and authorship are disposable,' Rai told the Press Trust of India. 'All I can do is dissociate myself from such a reckless and dystopian experiment.' He said his team had contacted the Indian Film and Television Directors' Association and was exploring legal options. Neither he nor the guild responded to the Guardian's request for comment at the time of publication. The film starred the Tamil actor Dhanush and the Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor as the star-crossed interfaith couple, one of whom dies in the original ending. Eros's catalogue includes Indian classics such as Sholay, Mother India, Om Shanti Om, and Bajirao Mastani. Its streaming service, Eros Now, hosts more than 11,000 digital titles. Dwivedi said Ambikapathy was produced entirely in-house with human supervision, and was being presented as an optional alternative rather than a replacement of the original film. Posters for the rerelease describe the ending as AI-powered, although Eros declined to confirm whether similar disclaimers will appear within the film itself. Dwivedi said the director's criticisms were 'emotional' and omitted relevant legal context. He pointed to an ongoing corporate dispute between Eros and Colour Yellow Productions, the studio co-founded by Rai. In an email to the Guardian, Colour Yellow's chief operating officer, Harini Lakshminarayan, said the company's partnership with Eros ended 'some time ago' due to operational challenges. 'To call this a 'respectful creative reinterpretation' while excluding the very people who made the film over a decade ago is deeply contradictory,' she wrote. She said the incident underscored 'the urgent need for fair, transparent protocols' on the use of AI, especially with archival material. 'If a finished film can be altered and rereleased without the director's knowledge, it sends out a clear and very troubling message – that the film-maker's voice is dispensable.' The film critic Sucharita Tyagi said: 'Most directors in India don't even own the rights to their films,' referencing examples such as Vasan Bala's Peddlers, which Eros International has still not released to the public after acquiring Indian distribution rights in 2012. 'If they decide to AI alter Peddlers and then release it, then it's a different film altogether.' The release has also raised questions about how the film's new 'happy ending' may reinterpret its interfaith storyline, a sensitive topic in India's political and cultural landscape. 'The film works because these are people trying to defy social norms,' said Tyagi. 'To now decide what a 'happy ending' looks like, 13 years later, is scary.' Ambikapathy is scheduled to open before Rai's latest feature, Tere Ishk Mein, also starring Dhanush and due for release in November. Rai has described the new film previously as being 'from the world of Raanjhanaa' but not a sequel. Eros, which holds the rights to Raanjhanaa, has denied any connection between the two projects. The rerelease comes amid growing experimentation with AI across the global film industry. In Hollywood, AI has been used for voice cloning, dubbing and visual effects, including accent enhancement in The Brutalist and simulating the voice of Anthony Bourdain in the 2021 documentary Roadrunner. Concerns about AI-generated scripts and the use of actors' likenesses were key issues in the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes.
