July 3, 2026
MAN AND ROBOTS: A weekly column from MARS Magazine on AI, Hollywood, and the future of work.
🎬 A24 Damage Control Mode While Building Its AI Studio
1. When the darling of cutting-edge film, A24, took a massive $75 million influx of cash from Google’s DeepMind AI unit last week, a number of film fans took it as a signal that the traditional filmmaker-centric party is over at the studio. Would the home of famously anti-AI Heretic directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who added “No Generative AI was used in the making of this film” to the credits of their 2024 hit horror film, move against its own filmmakers? How can A24 serve Google’s AI filmmaking goals while also supporting Kane Parsons, director of the studio’s biggest hit, Backrooms, as the auteur simultaneously blasts AI by saying, “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would”? Those are some of the questions being aimed at A24 in the wake of the massive funding from Google AI.
As a result, the usually critic-proof studio that rarely comments on itself actually responded to the AI concerns from theatergoers and film insiders alike. “This is a research partnership. We’re working side-by-side with DeepMind’s researchers to learn, iterate, and build, having an active hand in shaping new tools and workflows,” A24 representative Sophia Shin told Wired in an email following the investment news backlash. “Our relationship with our audience is something we don’t take for granted. This partnership exists because we want to dictate what tools get built for artists, and so they have a voice in shaping them rather than having tools handed to them. We’d rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines.”
What It Means: Hollywood still seems fairly split on the topic of AI, with some keeping an open mind to what it can offer as a tool, and others dismissing it wholesale as a poison to art in general. What A24 has demonstrated, despite the anti-AI stance of some of its directors, is that it is a business first, and its independent film-esque arthouse trappings are just that: good marketing and product design, nothing more. This isn’t an indictment of A24, rather, it’s a signal that A24 is in it for the long game and not just an altruistic hobby for its co-founders, Daniel Katz and David Fenkel. Additionally, former Adobe tech executive and venture capitalist Scott Belsky joined the studio last year to lead A24 Labs, so any director working with the studio should already be on notice that A24 is very interested in being at the forefront of using technology to tell its stories in any way possible.
Following the public outcry against the Google partnership, Belsky took to Twitter/X to offer his own take. “There is a right and wrong way to use technology — and when it’s new, the spectrum is entirely unclear,” said Belsky. “Whether it was the locomotive, the internet, the camera, computer graphics/CGI…all unclear at first. But the work to figure it out is the work that advances every industry.”
Given Belsky’s mandate to aggressively integrate AI tools into A24’s production process, it seems likely that the studio will become one of the first studios to make and distribute an AI-generated or at least heavily AI-assisted film that is widely released in theaters. Does that mean directors like Parsons and the team behind Heretic will leave? Or will they be convinced by Belsky’s internal efforts that AI isn’t the beginning of the end of film artistry, but just another tool? We’ll know relatively soon. None of the directors are signed to exclusive deals with A24, but Parsons’ Backrooms is now A24’s biggest success ever at $330 million worldwide, and the studio probably wants to cash in on that win with a sequel. As for Heretic directors Beck and Woods, they’re currently in production on 2027’s A Quiet Place Part III as screenwriters, with no word on their next project as directors.
It’s too early to tell whether the anti-AI crowd in Hollywood will remain firm in their stance, but all signs point to AI being widely adopted in the industry in the next couple of years. Beyond major studios experimenting with AI for animation, sound design, and VFX, when a boutique-ish studio like A24 dives headlong into the AI waters, it’s almost a kind of cultural permission slip for those who might have been on the fence, for better or worse. One thing I’m fairly confident in is that if there is a way to employ AI in filmmaking that isn’t cheap and reductive, the odds are high that A24 will be one of the studios to find the director who will be able to do it.
🎭 What’s in the AI Box? Kevin Spacey Answers
2. “People ask questions about how I feel about AI. I say, well, all I know is that the memories that I have of working with incredible directors and phenomenal actors and screenwriters, moments I’ve had in rehearsal rooms where something happened that wasn’t expected—someone went in a different direction and we discovered something—AI can’t do any of that. And that’s about trust, and that’s about working and collaborating with other human beings. I just don’t have any fear about that being replaced. If you have to ask AI every question you need an answer for, that’s not the way that creative things happen.”
–Kevin Spacey, actor, The Usual Suspects, House of Cards, during a Bill Maher interview
🔈 A Tidal Wave of Anti-AI Policy for Music
3. With the enormous success of Suno’s AI music creation tool, and AI music taking over the Billboard and Spotify charts, you’d think the debate over AI-generated music is already over. Not so fast. The folks over at Tidal aren’t ready to let human-created music fade so fast into the past. This week the digital music platform announced a new policy that dictates that no AI-generated music will receive royalties on its platform, and that users will now have controls that allow them to completely filter out AI-generated music.
“Each day, Tidal receives an overwhelming amount of AI-generated music from third-party distributors. It has been clear for some time that we need to evolve our platform and standards to deal with this new type of submission to our catalog,” said Tidal executive Robert Andersen, who is also the co-creator of Cash App and a former Apple interface designer, via Twitter/X. “We are announcing an AI-generated music policy designed to provide a great experience for our listeners, while protecting the authenticity and livelihoods of artists and rightholders.”
Hidden Tracks: The aggressively anti-AI move is a bit of a shocker coming from a tech veteran like Andersen, and his boss, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block, which owns Tidal. However, the decision reflects a growing sentiment in the music business where artists were already struggling to earn revenue on music streaming platforms before the rise of AI-generated music. Some AI music creators might wonder if this new policy is even legal. For now, the policy appears to be legally sound. Tidal describes AI-generated music as “music that is wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence.”
And as we know from a recent U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) decision, a significant amount of “human control over the expressive elements” must be involved for the work to be copyrightable. Of course, now the question is how the USCO or even Tidal can determine the amount of human input a work contains in order to deem it “not” mostly AI-generated. That is currently a case-by-case moving target. But as it stands at Tidal, if you’ve been pumping out mountains of really slick-sounding but mostly automated music hoping to get rich, Tidal isn’t the platform for you.
🎤 Madonna’s AI Insights: Like a Prayer for Music’s Future?
4. “Today, to get a record deal, you think about how many followers you have. That’s why in Bring Your Love I say ‘Don’t try to distract me with numbers,’ because I started without thinking about the charts, the streaming. Working only in terms of algorithms and artificial intelligence doesn’t allow you to take risks, which is the complete opposite of making art.”
–Madonna, singer/actress, commenting on her Confessions II album
*Source: Vogue Italia
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: Photo illustration of Kevin Spacey from ‘House of Cards’ via Netflix
