Michael Barbaro

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

This is The Daily on Sunday.

We all knew TV was dead, but thought, why not squeeze in one last development meeting?

This is a video, a kind of comedy sketch, produced by a company in the United Kingdom called Particle Six.

Now, Particle Six bills itself as the world's leading AI production studio.

So everything in this video, the voices you're hearing, the words that they're saying, all of it was generated by artificial intelligence.

And the star of this video is Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated scientist.

It seemed like a clever one-off.

But a few months later, Particle 6 announced that Ms.

Norwood was close to signing a deal to be represented by a major Hollywood talent agency.

The kind of thing you'd expect from an actual human actress.

And that news caused a sensation in Hollywood.

Good lord.

We're screwed.

Actors howled in protest.

You're still going to want to have real people.

The head of the largest actors union came out against it.

She, it, is a synthetic creation garnered from ill-gotten data.

Even Whoopi Goldberg.

weighed in on The View.