Brooks Barnes

And it's this big, visually impressive montage, a sprawling fantasy landscape.

You've got mountains, you've got angels falling from the sky on fire.

All of this was done with AI.

The creator of the show said they were going to do something less impressive because they really didn't have a big budget.

But once they got access to AI, now they can do this big, epic thing.

It actually makes me think of Furiosa, the sequel to Mad Max Fury Road.

By the time they did that, an actor from the original had died.

So they used AI to help recreate his performances.

Another place where people are seeing this is social media.

Instagram is awash in videos that are completely created by AI.

And sometimes you don't even notice it.

My husband has a master's degree in art history.

And the other day he came to me and said, isn't this little old lady cute?

I said, you realize that's an AI video, right?

Had no idea.

It was AI coke trucks driving by what were supposed to be adorable AI penguins and adorable AI rabbits.

But people really saw it as soulless and, you know, digital slop was what the critics said, which is sort of the opposite of what they were going for, which was emotional warmth.

So just a couple of years ago, AI was the absolute villain in Hollywood.

It's kind of amazing the degree to which Hollywood as an entity has turned around on it.

Even though that artists have said publicly, you know, how much they despise this.