Hollywood draws the AI line

PLUS: AI data centers head to the ocean, and Anthropic co-founder puts 60% odds on AI training itself soon

Author

Gen AI Art
May 06, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

In partnership with

One editor for writers, developers, and agents

Most doc tools make you choose: accessible for writers, or git-native for developers. Mintlify's editor does both. Writers get WYSIWYG editing, developers keep their git workflow, and AI agents contribute via MCP. Every change syncs both ways. Your whole team, in one place.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just made it official: AI-generated performances and scripts are out at the Oscars. Acting roles must now be “demonstably performed by humans with their consent,” and screenplays need to prove human authorship to qualify for the 99th Academy Awards. The ruling covers both acting and writing — the two most human-facing creative categories in film. As AI voices, digital doubles, and synthetic screenplays grow more capable, the entertainment industry’s most prestigious body has drawn the first formal line around what counts as human creative work.

While OpenAI has built the feature with strict privacy barriers, will users be comfortable sharing their most sensitive information with an AI? The move tests the boundaries between AI as a creative tool and a trusted personal companion.

Today in AI:

  • Hollywood locks AI out of Oscars acting and writing categories

  • Wave-powered ocean platforms raise $140M to run AI offshore

  • Anthropic co-founder puts 60% odds on AI training its own successor by 2029

What’s new? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences updated its eligibility rules for the 99th Academy Awards, formally barring AI-generated performances and scripts: acting roles must be “demonstably performed by humans with their consent,” and screenplays must be “human-authored” to qualify.

What matters?

  • The ruling covers both acting and writing — the most sweeping AI policy any major film body has issued, though films using AI in VFX or sound design remain fully eligible.

  • The Academy reserved the right to request documentation proving human authorship, signaling active enforcement rather than relying on self-reporting.

  • The rules apply to films released in 2026, making this year’s productions the first to navigate formal eligibility requirements around AI-generated creative work.

Why it matters?

As AI voices, digital doubles, and synthetic scripts become commercially viable, Hollywood’s most prestigious awards body has drawn the first formal boundary around human authorship and performance. How the Academy enforces — and eventually expands — these rules will shape what the entertainment industry considers “human” creative work for years ahead.

GUIDE

What’s new? Oregon startup Panthalassa closed a $140 million Series B led by Peter Thiel to build autonomous floating platforms that generate electricity from ocean waves and use it to run AI computing hardware — cooling the chips with seawater and transmitting results via Starlink.

What matters?

  • Panthalassa’s 85-meter steel nodes navigate remote waters through hull design alone — no engines required — and are fully independent of land-based power grids and infrastructure.

  • The $140M will complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland and deploy the first Ocean-3 nodes at sea this year, with commercial systems targeted for 2027.

  • Thiel positioned the project as a practical alternative to space-based compute proposals, addressing growing community opposition to building AI data centers near residential areas.

Why it matters?

AI infrastructure demands are colliding with energy constraints and public pushback against land-based data centers. Panthalassa’s approach — putting compute on autonomous wave-powered platforms in international waters — is one of the more inventive responses to a problem every major AI lab is grappling with.

SPONSORED BY WISPR FLOW

You think 4x faster than you type. Your IDE should keep up.

Wispr Flow lets you dictate prompts, acceptance criteria, and bug reproductions inside Cursor or Warp — with automatic file name and variable recognition. Say user_id, get user_id. Say useEffect, get useEffect.

Paste directly into GitHub, Jira, or Linear. Give coding agents the full context they need without typing a novel.

89% of messages sent with zero edits. Millions of developers use Flow daily, including teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

What’s new? In his Import AI newsletter, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark made a data-backed case that AI systems are on track to automate their own research and development — putting a 60% probability on a frontier model fully training its successor before the end of 2028.

What matters?

  • METR’s benchmark data shows AI can now handle tasks that take a skilled human up to 12 hours — up from just 30 seconds of independent work with GPT-3.5 in 2022.

  • SWE-Bench coding performance jumped from 2% (Claude 2, late 2023) to 93.9% with today’s leading models — a near-complete reversal in under three years.

  • Clark frames this as an engineering question, not an AGI debate: can AI run the workflow of training the next model? Based on current trajectories, his analysis says yes — and soon.

Why it matters?

If AI can start training its own successors, the pace of capability growth shifts from “limited by human researcher time” to something far harder to predict or control. Clark’s analysis is one of the clearest public frameworks for how that transition could happen — and when.

This massive rollout moves drone delivery from a novel experiment to a mainstream logistics operation for one of the world's largest retailers. The move accelerates the race for automated, on-demand commerce, pushing the entire last-mile delivery industry forward.

Everything else in AI

Unity launched Unity AI into open beta for all Unity 6 developers — a built-in agent that writes C# scripts, generates scenes from images, and builds placeholder assets without leaving the editor.

SAG-AFTRA reached a new four-year studio deal with expanded AI protections, with negotiators holding out until studios agreed to stronger guardrails on using performers’ likenesses and work for AI training.

Mayo Clinic published results showing its REDMOD AI model detected pancreatic cancer up to 3 years before diagnosis — catching 73% of prediagnostic cases vs. 39% by radiologists reviewing the same scans.

Essential AI Guides - Reading List:

Let us know!

Work with us

Reach 100k+ engaged Tech Professionals, Engineers, Managers and decision makers. Join brands like MorningBrew, HubSpot, Prezi, Nike, Ahref, Roku, 1440, Superhuman, and others in showcasing your product to our audience. Get in touch now →