April 24, 2026
MAN AND ROBOTS: A weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work.
🎬 Star Wars Films & AI
1. Next to Disney’s Marvel films, the franchise most heavily reliant on visual effects (VFX) is the Star Wars universe, also under the Disney umbrella. Jon Favreau (The Mandalorian & Grogu, Iron Man 1 and 2), one of the captains of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, recently gave his thoughts on how AI may play out in film. Now, fellow Star Wars director Shawn Levy (Star Wars: Starfighter, Deadpool & Wolverine) is weighing in on the conversation nearly everyone in Hollywood is having.
“To date, I’ve not incorporated AI in any meaningful way in any phase of my storytelling process, but I have no doubt that in the course of my career we will see its integration,” Levy said on the red carpet this week at The Breakthrough Prize event in Los Angeles during a chat with reporter Marc Malkin. “To the point that many smarter people than I have made, it’s about integrating these technologies responsibly and with still the primacy of the creative voice and not a potential replacement for that voice because I think that what you get from creative voice and vision is singular and irreplicable, but if we can use these emerging AI capacities to support storytelling in still a kind of creative and human first workflow then I think it’s something to embrace, not fear.”
What The Force Tells Me: Favreau, in particular, has been on the cutting edge of using technology to reduce costs while not sacrificing any of the movie magic inherent in Star Wars. His use of massive digital screens that serve as virtual environments is just the latest example of how Star Wars stories are employing technology to save on VFX and location costs. Will the Star Wars universe move beyond mere VFX and eventually incorporate AI characters in its live-action properties? For now, the franchise’s directors are being conservative and not tipping their hands. But if Disney’s aggressive moves with OpenAI are any indication, the next few years will likely see the emergence of AI in Star Wars films.
🎭 Charlize Theron Backtracks on AI Comments
2. “Honestly, I talked out of my ass. I don’t know what’s going to happen in ten years, okay? Nobody does. But I assume that a living, live performance would be hard [to reproduce with AI]. And then someone’s like, ‘There’s a dancing robot in Hong Kong’…but he’s not Misty Copeland.” I don’t know what’s gonna happen in ten years, I think we’re all just taking it day by day. I got to make this movie [Apex via Netflix], and it’s not AI, it’s me, so things are good.”
–Charlize Theron, actress, updating her comments about Timothée Chalamet and AI
*Source: Variety
📚 Writers Org Helps Find Human Books vs. AI Books
3. If you’re not a book author, you may not be aware that the independent book publishing space has been far ahead of the public on generative AI before ChatGPT truly went mainstream in 2022. As a result, Amazon has been flooded with AI-generated books for years. And as the AI models have gotten better, so too have the approaches to using AI to self-publish books.
Amazon’s guidelines require authors to disclose if their book is AI-generated. However, if the author deems their book AI-assisted (partially AI-generated, with edits and some human-written passages, for example), no disclosure is necessary. And now, since there are now AI tools available specifically designed to allow would-be authors to operate in this “AI-assisted” grey area, it’s become even more difficult to tell what is and isn’t AI-generated or “assisted” on Amazon.
In response, the Authors Guild has launched a “Human Authored” certification program. The program allows authors who don’t use AI to proclaim such using a certification mark on the book’s cover, and register the book with the Authors Guild regarding the claim. And while the organization doesn’t check each book to verify the claims, like the U.S. Copyright Office, the certification largely works on the honor system. Notably, books that were AI-assisted (not including editing tools) are not eligible for the certification mark.
Real Talk: Will readers care? That’s hard to know. Some diners only eat grass-fed beef, others are fine with whatever the mystery meat is served at your favorite fast food joint. But by launching this program, the Authors Guild is at least attempting to help authors who write without AI to differentiate themselves, and perhaps find the audiences who are looking for them.
📺 SNL Comedy Star Predicted AI Actors?
4. “One night when we were at SNL, I was so excited, like, ‘Oh my God, this job’s so great.’ And Will Ferrell was kind of dark and he was like, ‘I don’t know. Who knows how long this is going to last?’ This was 30 years ago. He goes, ‘I really don’t know. I just think it’s not going to last long, and I think actors are eventually going to be replaced by robots, and they’re not going to need human actors anymore.’ And I was like, ‘What, are you crazy? You’re being so dark.’ And he was like, ‘No, I really think they’re going to be replaced by robots. They won’t need humans.’ And I thought he was crazy.”
–Molly Shannon, actress, Saturday Night Live, speaking as a guest on The Jimmy Kimmel Show on April 17, 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: Modified image of Will Ferrell from his son Magnus Ferrell on TikTok
