Will Actors Always Be Needed?
... still wondering if robots have celluloid dreams.
Machine Cinema is home to the creators, builders, and business insiders defining the future of media and entertainment. The conversation that matters is happening here.
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Edited by Elizabeth Kealoha. Pod + Images by Ant Neely.
Weekly Edition
Last week Anthropic’s valuation chatter hit twelve digits while its best model quietly got throttled. The week an upscaler turned 19th-century African Americans white and the community refused to let it slide. The week Cannes prep dragged us all into a debate about whether actors are still necessary — and someone wrote a satirical reply so good it’s getting screenshotted across DMs.
Plus: a benchmark fight, a Women’s Gen Jam love-fest, and Theo’s prompt-to-scene moment.
Let’s get into it.
🏆 COMMUNITY WINS
A strong week for festival energy.
Brogan Wassell, Andrew “Squid” Montanez, JKR, Jon Stray — all dropped AIFF Runway submissions. Andrew’s The Crunch Job even comes with a Santa Monica workshop on how he made it in two days.
Mike OverJK — has a film screening at AIFA Cannes on May 21 at the Majestic.
Larry Layfield — released Echoes of Havana, made with Seedance 2.0.
Christine Carr, Laura Tornga, Irina Logra — organized the inaugural Women’s Gen Jam, by all accounts a hit.
THIS WEEK IN ‘COMMUNITY’
Will Actors Always Be Needed?
Guillaume opened a Cannes-prep thread asking for arguments on both sides for a French TV segment. The replies were the most thoughtful exchange of the week. Miriam delivered a long, candid list — stunt safety, retake economics, and a frank note on Hollywood's tolerance of difficult talent. Kelsey, a lawyer peer-reviewed on AI actors since 2019, offered to run a webinar on the legal stakes. Aaron Bhugobaun reframed it: "the technology is not going away, and this is bigger than just actors...it's every society and industry." Then Jennifer wrote a satirical reply imagining a future chat room of agentic directors debating whether humans are still needed — before turning sincere: nothing replaces the messy work of human collaboration.
[BASECAMP]
The $900B Compute Crunch
Minh laid out a thesis that ate the WeLoveRobots channel for two days: Dario's blog and the Pentagon back-and-forth pulled enough enterprise demand toward Claude that Anthropic ran into compute constraints, throttled Opus 4.7, downgraded users to 4.6, and tightened Pro-plan token limits — meanwhile OpenAI's growth slowed as users defected. Aaron pushed back on the Zerohedge sourcing ("I generally agree with your premise"), Minh conceded the point, and then Fred dropped the CNBC story about Anthropic weighing a $900B raise. Aaron later flagged a follow-up: Pentagon says Anthropic is still blacklisted, but Mythos is a separate issue. The subsidization era, as Minh put it, is hitting its first discount constraint.
[WELOVEROBOTS]
The Upscaler That Whitewashed History
Sutu tried to upscale a 19th-century image of African Americans for a non-profit working on abolitionist-movement education. OpenArt's tool turned the subjects white. Sutu posted the side-by-side, referenced Coded Bias, and the channel responded fast — Topaz's Monji jumped in offering DMs to surface model issues, Fred called it "terrible output" and credited Sutu for making noise, and Sutu eventually confirmed Topaz delivered a better result. A reminder that bias audits are not optional infrastructure.
[BASECAMP]
SPONSORED
Benchmark Beef: FilmArena vs. The Methodology Police
Mehul launched FilmArena.ai with a 10K-participant, 1K-video benchmark putting Alibaba’s HappyHorse just below Seedance and PixVerse C1. Mike OverJK called BS — one iteration per user, English-only prompts, no JSON or Chinese, no production-context testing. The exchange got heated but landed in a good place: Mike asked for the conversation to move to DMs to design a better benchmark, and Mehul welcomed it. “It’s not 2025 vibes anymore. We’re replacing traditional pipelines. Let’s do it properly.”
[BASECAMP]
The Women’s Gen Jam Glow-Up
Caroline, Stina, Michelle, and Rachel all came back to the channel to praise Sunday’s first Women’s Gen Jam, organized by Christine, Laura, and Irina with Women in Tech sponsoring. Stina liked it enough to make a TikTok about it. Laura confirmed more women-led events are coming, open to the full community.
[BASECAMP]
EVENTS, SCREENINGS, FESTIVALS, & MEETUPS
AIFA Cannes — Mike OverJK has a film screening, and members are gathering at Marché from May 12 onward. May 21, the Majestic.
Cannes Lions Machine Cinema gathering — June, via Christopher Carew →luma.com/yoxf5s0o
AI on the Lot — San Francisco — Use code GENJAMMER for 25% off →aionthelot.com
🔗 This Week’s Link Drops
Industry News
OpenAI misses key revenue and user targets ahead of IPO sprint — WSJ
Pentagon: Anthropic still blacklisted, but Mythos is a separate issue — via Aaron
Lionsgate’s Kathleen Grace on AI, John Wick, and Twilight — Hollywood Reporter
Inside the World-Conquering Rise of the Micro-Drama — The New Yorker
Tools & Tech
Topaz Astra 2 launch — prompts on upscale, credits available via Monji — Topaz Labs
ElevenLabs Music platform — ElevenLabs
Runway $500-credits API hackathon — Runway
Where the Goblins Came From — OpenAI
AI Filmmaking
Brogan Wassell — AIFF submission — YouTube
Andrew Montanez — The Crunch Job — YouTube
Larry Layfield — Echoes of Havana — YouTube
Jon Stray — Resistance series — YouTube
Worth Watching/Resources
MAKE NOISE
Cannes is around the corner, valuations are eating headlines, and benchmarks are about to get a lot more rigorous because of conversations happening right here. The work this week wasn’t only the films — it was also the calling-out, the methodology fights, and the satirical replies that landed harder than essays.
Make something. Show your work. Argue in good faith.
See you next week!
— Machine Cinema Newsletter
Given the unfortunate amount of scandals/exploitation previously documented in Hollywood, I'm very very okay with human child actors being replaced by AI.