Andy Serkis Was the Future of Digital Acting. Now AI Wants His Job

Adario Strange
July 24, 2026

✍️ Substack Gives the AI Power to the People

1. Substack has taken an amazingly bold step by entering into a partnership with AI detection company Pangram to allow Substack readers to easily detect if a Substack post or comment was written with AI assistance or by a human. Substack CEO Chris Best is careful to point out that the platform isn’t prohibiting AI-generated or AI-assisted text, rather, they’re giving readers a choice to decide what they want to read.

“The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing,” wrote Best on the official Substack updates page. “When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.”

My Confession: I actually conducted a small investigation last year to see if AI-generated text had infiltrated Substack. My findings were startling. I didn’t just find massive use of AI-generated Substacks, I found that some of the most prominent, trusted Substacks (specifically in the categories of business and tech, where I focused my research) that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers are pumping out AI-generated newsletters without disclosing this to readers. My confession is that I wrote the piece, but I decided not to publish it. In it I outed a handful of prominent Substackers for undisclosed AI-generated text (in some cases, up to 80% of the text was AI).

My decision rested on two reasons: 1. Although I personally find AI detection tools to be quite accurate after several years of testing them, their results will currently not stand up in a court of law. So if you use AI detection tools to make such a claim against a writer, you’re on shaky legal ground, unless the writer admits it. 2. Frankly, some of the writers I caught are so popular, I knew I’d make a lot of unwanted enemies, including from the ranks of the readers of some of these Substacks. Additionally, last year, it was unclear to me just how much readers did or did not care whether what they’re reading is AI-generated or not.

Today, I’m more certain than I was in 2025 that a large cohort of readers want to be informed that they’re reading AI. But now that Substack is providing AI text detection as a default, the results of my investigation are no longer necessary. Anyone who cares can easily check their favorite Substack author. Will this result in some losing paid subscribers? Maybe, maybe not. This metric may very well answer the question as to whether readers care about getting their text from machines or their fellow humans.

🤖 Can AI Replace Andy Serkis’s Gollum?

2. “There are elements of the character that could work, but at the end of day we’re talking about storytelling, and storytelling and drama is what happens between actors, and performance capture, obviously, is an actor’s authored technology. So I don’t think you’ll be able to replace performance… not as yet. For small prompted moments, I think it stands up. But the whole notion of a script, from A to Z, page one to 120 and the minutiae of actors’ decisions that author their characters, I don’t believe that that could be completely replaced.”

—Andy Serkis, actor/director, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

*Source: Variety

🎬 Aronofsky’s $15 million AI Movie Dream Injection

3. When acclaimed film director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain) launched his Primordial Soup AI filmmaking studio last year, reactions in Hollywood were muted. We had yet to see the wonders of ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and its next-level realistic AI video footage. And his first AI outing, On This Day… 1776, for Time Magazine, was ripped by some as not worthy of the director’s past pedigree. Despite that, some are optimistic about his efforts because his fledgling AI studio just landed $15 million in new funding. The injection of cash was revealed via a Securities and Exchange Commission filing uncovered by Variety this week.

Important Context: The reception for Hollywood director Neill Blomkamp’s (District 9, Elysium, Chappie) AI horror short Nightborne has been largely negative, that is, if you focus on the tech press and social media. Many viewers immediately branded it “AI slop.” But the truth is a little more complicated. Since the video launched, it has racked up 205,000 views, with most of the comments on the video leaning negative. But when you check the Likes vs. Dislikes on the video, they are evenly split, 7,160 Likes vs. 7,211 Dislikes. Compared to previous high-profile AI videos I’ve reviewed, this is the most favorable reaction metric I’ve seen.

It seems to be a hint that Blomkamp has hit closest to the mark of what mainstream audiences might accept in the way of AI-generated movies. Regardless of Aronofsky’s rough AI video start, he’s yet another credentialed Hollywood director aiming to replicate the more even reception Blomkamp is currently experiencing among film fans.

📖 Dave Eggers on AI at OpenAI meeting

4. “The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in . . . If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them.They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.”
—Dave Eggers, author, The Circle, in a private meeting with OpenAI staff
*Source: The Financial Times
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