Leo DiCaprio’s AI Future, Chris Pratt’s AI Movie Glitch, & Study Reveals Our Greatest AI Fear
MAN AND ROBOTS: Weekly signals on how AI and automation are reshaping work & creativity.
JAN. 23, 2026
🤖
1. “I remember talking about the various people who could play these characters, and early on, I was like, ‘Should we have it be an AI, where the judge is actually AI, and we create an AI?’ And everyone was like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’” Mercy star Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) on casting the role of the AI judge before Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible, Dune, Silo) took on the role.
*Source: Entertainment Weekly
Meaningful Context: A day before the film’s Jan. 23 release, 75 reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes resulted in an overall 26% Rotten rating for the film about an AI system that serves as the courtroom judge for humans accused of crimes. The questionable topic (AI judging humankind), along with the direction of Timur Bekmambetov, whose last film (also distributed by Amazon) was the disastrous Ice Cube-led War of the Worlds (4% rating), seems to spell doom for this science fiction take on AI. That Pratt even considered filling Ferguson’s role with an actual LLM chatbot probably should have been an early hint at the film’s pedigree.
🎭
2. The 2026 Best Actor Academy Award nominee for One Battle After Another: “It could be an enhancement tool for a young filmmaker to do something we’ve never seen before…I think anything that is going to be authentically thought of as art has to come from the human being.”
-Leonardo DiCaprio on AI being used in filmmaking
*Source: Time
