MAN AND ROBOTS BRIEF: Dec. 24, 2025 🎄
Weekly signals on how AI and automation are reshaping work & creativity.
This is the inaugural issue of the Man And Robots Brief. Future editions will be for paid subscribers. Merry Christmas!
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1. “Just found out there’s people in LA feeding scripts into AI that gives the characters voices and reads the script out loud for you.”
-Benny Safdie, director of The Smashing Machine
*Source: Safdie on X.com
Insight: This is probably Google’s NotebookLM.
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2. AI Optimist: “It’s so, so important that women are involved in AI… because it will be the future of filmmaking. And you can be sad and lament it all you want, but the change is here.”
-Reese Witherspoon, actor/producer
*Source: Rolling Stone
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3. Inception and The Dark Knight Rises actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt launches star-driven Creators Coalition on AI (CCAI) to protect Hollywood jobs from being taken by AI.
Who cares: About 53% of SAG-AFTRA’s 160,000 actors have done background work. Digital scanning and AI actors promise to automate these jobs out of existence.
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4. AI Skeptic: “I’ve seen movies completely created by AI, story and acting and everything, and they look completely dead. They are stories, but they have no soul.”
-Werner Herzog, director, Grizzly Man
*Source: Team Coco
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5. Disney stock has risen roughly 3% since announcing an OpenAI character licensing deal and $1 billion investment in the AI video company on Dec. 11.
Snapshot: Instead of backlash against the Hollywood giant embracing AI, the public has reacted with a mix of indifference and muted business optimism.
