Oct. 2, 2026
📺 BBC Exec Reveals What’s in His AI Inbox
1. “The whole industry faces jeopardy… There is infinite choice, and there’s scarce trust. Everyone’s got the ability in their hands to create content at the standard of a Hollywood studio in some cases. It’s not perfect, but look at what you can do, and that’s changing all the time. Somebody sent me a 50-minute episode of Doctor Whothat was AI-generated the other day. It’s pretty good. I mean, it’s not going to replace humans…”
—Matt Brittin, BBC Director-General
*Source: Royal Television Society London Convention 2026
🤖 Will the Real World War III Be Mankind vs. Machine?
2. One of the fault lines in the battle of humans versus AI is becoming apparent, and it’s the growing debate around anthropomorphizing AI rather than treating it as just another tech tool.
• China vs. the U.S. on AI as “Entities”
Earlier this year, China made its position clear by banning AI companions, indicating a concern that AI chatbots posing as living entities could adversely impact Chinese society. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) comes under a lot of scrutiny for how it wields governmental control over its citizens’ lives, but some in the West may be looking at a relatively progressive human-first policy in this case.
Contrast this with the U.S., where two leading tech companies, OpenAI (Dots, which users are encouraged to name) and Meta (Muse and its “thicc” mascot called Jolly), have both just launched AI agents that are fronted by cute AI mascots. These cuddly (oddly child-toy-themed) mascots are designed to lower everyone’s guard and get users to trust the algorithm with all the keys to one’s bank account, email account, credit card, insurance policy, calendar, travel tools, medical visits, and pretty much any other private information one wouldn’t normally hand over to one unified corporate locus of control. Several studies have already linked AI chatbots delivering sage advice to human users to potentially bad outcomes.
So while China is taking preemptive steps to decouple human trust from AI characters, the practice of U.S. companies, some with bad records regarding the protection of consumers’ mental health, actively working to promote AI as a “buddy” you can trust,seems headed for knock-on effects that transcend mental health and possibly bleed into personal finance impacts. Mascots are marketing gold. There’s a reason we all know and love who “Mickey” is. But the stakes with AI are a lot higher than where you get your cartoons from.
This week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a legal motion to get OpenAI to “stop calling [AI] safe, stop pretending [AI] is human, stop selling [AI] to kids.” Although the leading AI companies, including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, have made great inroads into getting the U.S. government to warm up to their interests, exemplified by this week’s AI lunch with Trump, Florida’s move could be the start of a trend toward “de-humanizing AI” as a popular non-partisan political bully pulpit in the U.S.
• Religion vs. Big Tech Fight on AI Personage
What started as long ecumenical essays on the difference between the human spirit and AI slowly morphed into Pope Leo XIV going on a full-on warpath against AI. Just today, the Pope took to Twitter/X to say, “In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”
This unusually urgent statement from the Pope follows an exposé this week revealing that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah has been on a campaign around the globe to convince various religious leaders that AI model consciousness is real and that Claude has “moral status.”
Olah’s meetings with religious leaders have included Catholic, Jewish, evangelical, Ubuntu, Sikh, and other spiritual traditions on his quest to have AI consciousness taken seriously. However, in the article, he adds the caveat, “To be clear, we don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.”
What It All Means: If Olah, a former Catholic who is now an atheist, is being sincere, then his approach seems reasonable, given that we still don’t have a true grasp of what consciousness even is. However, this discourse around AI consciousness and religion is exactly the trajectory I’ve been writing about for the last few years. The issue of God, belief, and human meaning continues to pit nations and tribes against one another. So, assuming that AI being treated as conscious by some would not involve a heated debate, and possibly more, has always been naive at best.
We are now moving toward the inevitable point at which we, as a species, will need to decide if increasingly capable AI models will eventually be considered as entities…with rights. Or, as some academics have posited, will superintelligent (constrained by guardrails) AI be relegated to hyper-intelligent slaves? During the brutal Transatlantic Slave Trade, religion was often used to justify the slavery of humans, deeming Africans not fully imbued with the same spiritual status as non-Africans. Later, religion became a significant lever to help acknowledge the rights of black American slaves on their path to freedom.
This is why this debate has so many ethicists and religious leaders confused and searching for new answers (Pope Leo XIV notwithstanding). In the case of African slaves, the ethical leap was primarily attached to skin color and phenotypes similar enough to those of other humans that shifting the Overton window to “who deserves freedom” was relatively straightforward for many. But how do you apply such ethical and existential questions to disembodied “entities” who don’t look human and whose cognitive horsepower begins to surpass that of humans?
In that case, religion might eventually become the shield behind which the human AI master hides to preserve his own freedom. And that might be what the current Pope, himself not averse to logic as he holds a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Villanova, has already accounted for in his passionate rebuke of AI being treated as beings.
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💰 Battle of the Hollywood Big Bosses Over AI
3. “[Jeffrey Katzenberg] is now doing this AI thing with actually a pretty competent guy [former Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa]… I would say to you the following. Probably the Chinese, through illegal means, are the best at [AI video]. So [Katzenberg] is now gonna go and annoy all the [Hollywood] studios, as he does well, and try to get them to make it legal. Like, make it the best and that it’s official, so that there’s some payments. I’m assuming, I don’t know this. And I look forward to the studios getting his annoying phone calls, trying to convince them. But it’s really all about Jeffrey, and all of his transactions are only about Jeffrey, not about any of the situations, which is the upsetting thing.”
—Ari Emanuel, CEO of TKO, exec chair of WME, on Katzenberg’s AI manifesto
*Source: The Town with Matt Belloni
🎥 Ellison Celebration Sets Stage for Hollywood Gutting
4. Now that Paramount Skydance’s $110.9 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. has been approved by U.S. District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, the combined new mega-studio needs a new name. New owner David Ellison used the occasion to finally join X.com (formerly known as Twitter) and make the transition official. In his first post, Ellison announced that the studio group will simply be called Skydance, ditching the previous Paramount Skydance moniker, as well as the list of nicknames that have dogged the controversial acquisition, such as WarnerMount, ParaBros, and others. “We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one,” Ellison said of the name choice. “Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. — and all our extraordinary brands — to remain in the spotlight.”
Aftermath: Despite fierce resistance to the acquisition by some prominent Hollywood insiders and key U.S. politicians, the deal is done, and many expect that it will bring with it a massive round of layoffs, plunging Los Angeles even deeper into an entertainment job crisis. As for the potential politics-meets-entertainment ramifications of the deal, speculation continues to simmer.
First off, CNN staffers reportedly expressed relief after finding out earlier this week that Ellison plans to leave CNN CEO Mark Thompson in place as head of the news network, rather than install Bari Weiss, whose high-profile moves as the new head of CBS News have produced non-stop headlines questioning her decisions regarding the network’s editorial direction. Still, Thompson is expected to be under at least some pressure as Ellison maintains his close relationship with President Trump. Ellison has also decided to name Ynon Kreiz (former CEO of Mattel) as his co-CEO of the new combined Skydance organization. This is a clever move in that it brings in an operational expert (with a reputation for cost-cutting) to shepherd the gigantic new conglomerate, and simultaneously gives Ellison a corporate bad-guy blame magnet when the inevitable cuts to the company’s ranks become a reality.
Interestingly, the year-long slide of Paramount Skydance stock accelerated on Wednesday ($18.62 exactly one year ago, compared to today’s $9.27 price), when the Warner Bros. acquisition was made official. Those numbers are among the dashboard indicator lights telling us that Wall Street isn’t confident that the collection of brands merits the nearly $80 billion in debt Ellison is now saddled with as a result of the deal. Stock pressure plus insane debt plus a margin-obsessed new co-CEO equals…prepare for a headcount and budget bloodbath at Skydance starting now and into 2027. .✍︎
🎭 Affleck’s Post-Netflix AI Deal Hollywood Prediction
5. “I feel [that film] is one of the least likely domains to be disintermediated by AI…I worry about learned helplessness. I worry about responsible use. I don’t worry about Skynet. And I don’t think that it’s going to take over [the movie] business in any meaningful way. I think it’s going to be additive. But I think someone has to actually step in and do it in a way where it is that… It’s like a lot of technologies that require sort of getting comfortable and getting familiar with.”
—Ben Affleck, actor/director, Gone Girl, Good Will Hunting
*Source: Bloomberg Screentime 2026
MAN AND ROBOTS is a weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work. All editorial text is written by humans.
Cover image: A photo illustration of Pope Leo XIV surrounded by Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and their AI agent mascots. Pope photo via CC Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar
