Ethan Hawke's AI Warning, Aronofsky's AI History Experiment, & Amazon's $50B OpenAI Valentine
MAN AND ROBOTS: Weekly signals on how AI and automation are reshaping work & creativity.
JAN. 29, 2026
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1. On Thursday, Darren Aronofsky’s AI film studio startup Primordial Soup launched an AI video series on the Time Magazine YouTube channel called On This Day... 1776. The series is described as “a week-by-week narrative of the most iconic year of America’s founding.” Produced with support from Google DeepMind, the videos, which are under five minutes, are all AI-generated. However, the production team notes that the voices are human actors who are members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Currently, the videos are sponsored in part by Salesforce, which has its branding at the end of each episode.
Reception: Time’s YouTube channel has 1.5 million subscribers. Episode one drew 15,000 views, and episode two picked up 7,000 views, as of this writing. Despite the high-quality visual outputs, most of the YouTube comments on the videos have been negative. Similarly, comments on the Primordial Soup X.com post announcing the series were mostly anti-AI, calling the series “slop.” Nevertheless, there are at least some positive comments on episode two, which hints that there may be interest in the series from the YouTube audience.
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2. This week, actor and Creators Coalition for AI (CCAI) co-founder Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises) visited Utah to encourage lawmakers to pass a state bill (HB286) that would require AI software developers to “create, implement, and publish public safety and child protection plans” for their AI models.
What He Said: “I’m worried about [my children] growing up in a future that’s dominated by these amoral AI businesses that have proven, time and time again, that they are incapable of prioritizing the well-being of kids,” said Gordon-Levitt. “I’m asking you, as a tech enthusiast and as a businessman and as a fellow American and as a dad, please do the right thing and pass this bill.”
