THR’s “Most Powerful in AI” List Is Out… 🙄.
... still wondering if robots have celluloid dreams.
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Edited by Elizabeth Kealoha. Pod + Images by Ant Neely.
Sunday Edition
Happy Mother’s Day to all you Mothers! 💕
Sora’s gone. The Hollywood Reporter dropped its annual “Most Powerful in AI” list and the community had thoughts — sharp ones. The Impossible Commute deadline ambushed half of us, so we slopped accordingly. And in the middle of all of it, Minh declared the Slopacolypse has arrived: humans are now performing imperfection just to prove they’re human.
It was a week of eulogies, eye-rolls, and engineering takes. Let’s get into it.
🏆 COMMUNITY WINS
A few well-deserved shoutouts from the week:
Chris White — The Heretiks will show advanced footage at Cannes (per Deadline), and Chris was also featured in The Ankler’s piece on Backrooms, Kane Parsons, and the Curry Barker young-horror wave.
Alex Naghavi & Ezra Li — Released their new short Le Drip, with Ezra coming in as a Gen:48 winner.
Sultan — His MIT Reality Hack team was selected for an exclusive international tech accelerator through IBC, with a chance to show their XR + AI + Entertainment project at scale this summer.
THIS WEEK IN ‘COMMUNITY’
The Hollywood Reporter's "Most Powerful in AI" List Got Roasted
THR's 2026 list dropped and the community wasn't having it. Monica suggested a retitle: "the most popular people the Hollywood Reporter is in bed with list." Multiple members questioned specific inclusions — particularly Justine Bateman. One member dropped a real piece of intel: Disney is actively onboarding Runway, with weekly calls for employees on how to use it better. Martin landed the cleanest read: the list isn't journalism, it's a funnel. "These lists serve to cement the likes of THR as 'a place where the minds meet' — an easy onramp for the next event and speaker series."
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Sora's Gone. Long Live the API Sweater.
OpenAI quietly retired Sora, and the chat went into mourning. Wuz Good asked, “Wait is Sora gone?” Brogan confirmed: “Yeah… it got old yellered.” Mike delivered the eulogy of the year: “Sometimes I still catch her scent on her API sweater. For a second, I forget she’s gone. I look toward the door like she might walk in… It’s stupid, I know… but it feels like part of her is still here.” Later he conceded: “Sora 2 is still the best slop generator. RIP my love.”
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The Vibe Coding Reckoning
A study claiming "real engineers don't vibe code" sparked the deepest WeLoveRobots thread of the week. Mike introduced "Dead Codes Society" — the graveyard of zombie code that vibe-coded projects accumulate, the kind that breaks everything when you try to delete it. Rahul countered with a working framework: PRD → spec doc → architecturally-prioritized task list → execute. "Just because the AI can code for you doesn't mean you shouldn't have some sort of process." Mike's line was the keeper: "AI didn't kill programming. It killed junior levels and just exposed who actually understands it."
[WELOVEROBOTS]
The Slopacolypse Came Early
Minh shared a thread on humans deliberately performing imperfection to prove they’re not AI — typos, weird angles, verbal fillers — and named it: “AI helps create slop. So now humans have to be sloppy to be seen as humans. Slopacolypse came early.” Mike added: “Human SLOP!” John just nodded: “Wabi Sabi MF’ers!” The bit cuts both ways. We spent two years trying to make AI look like it was made by a person. Now we’re studying how to make people look like they weren’t made by AI.
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SPONSORED
🔗 This Week’s Link Drops
Industry News
New Oscars rules for 2027 on AI actors and screenplays — Hollywood Reporter
Lionsgate, AI, and Kathleen Grace — Hollywood Reporter
Elon Musk: xAI to be dissolved and folded into new SpaceXAI structure — FinanceFeeds
Tools & Tech
Google’s Flow music partnership — Google
AI Filmmaking
How AI is transforming China’s entertainment industry (microdramas) — NYT
India’s AI filmmaking landscape — Hollywood Reporter
Backrooms, Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, and the young-horror wave — The Ankler
AI music is flooding streaming services — but who wants it? — The Verge
Chasing AI’s Creative Ghost — Kai (Substack)
Worth Watching/Resources
Jack Clark: “End-to-end automated AI R&D by 2028” — Substack
China’s “annotation army” — Sixth Tone
China powers AI boom with undersea data centers — Scientific American
LEAVE A LITTLE WABI SABI…
This week we mourned a model, mocked a list, and made peace with the idea that the future of authenticity might involve performing imperfection on purpose. The community shipped fast, debated harder, and somehow turned a missed deadline into a meme. Whatever you're working on next — make it weird, make it yours, and don't be afraid to leave a little wabi sabi in the file.
See you next week!
— Machine Cinema Newsletter
The most inane thing a fresh, generation of creators can do is to get subsumed by the establishment and re-feed their vampiric, boomer-controlled pipeline. Old Hollywood is dead, long live the Creator class. Let’s create new ways and networks and distribution outlets and ways of celebrating talent.