Hollywood Is Not Cooked. You Are.

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Swashbuckling heroes locked in epic battles. Fictional anime characters coming to life like never seen before. Kanye West singing in Mandarin in a Mandopop music video. Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster.

These visuals look really good, I agree. It is appealing and cinematic. But it is not cinema, just high-quality slop.

If you have been through social media lately, you may have seen all these jaw-dropping visuals being shared with captions saying, “Hollywood is cooked.”

Maybe it is my general disdain for Gen Z terminology, but I get really irked seeing such posts (do not conflate the fine art of cooking with such garbage).

More so when these posts appear to be part of a hype fest for Seedance 2.0, Chinese company ByteDance’s latest video generation model.

AI Slop In 4K

Seedance 2.0 departs from the lottery-style workflow of earlier models. Instead of a 20% success rate, it claims 90% on the first try. Its architecture mimics the human brain to generate video and audio simultaneously. This ensures explosions bang and doors slam in perfect sync without post-production.

Hollywood, Bollywood and all other Woods are NOT cooked.

They will evolve and restructure. They will adapt. If visuals were the only thing that mattered, Michael Bay would be the monarch of cinema and Martin Scorsese would be unemployed.

The future of the industry will likely be defined by a "human-in-the-loop" model. The creative process will accelerate but still be led by directors and editors serving as the ultimate curators. We are moving from shooting volumes of raw footage to directly delivering finished films, blurring the line between production and post-production entirely.

While social media argues about aesthetics, the money folks are already betting on AI.

• A recent survey by CVL Economics found that three-quarters of survey respondents said AI tools have already supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs in their business division.

• The same study projects that by 2026, over 204,000 entertainment jobs in the US alone will be disrupted.

• Former Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has publicly speculated that AI could reduce animation production costs by as much as 90 per cent.

The industry is not waiting for the tech to be perfect, but just good enough…to fire people.

This demonstrates how AI slop is creeping into filmmaking. However, it is more likely to affect the blockbuster films made solely to mint money (like the 294th installation of the Transformer franchise). So yes, maybe that part of the film industry is cooked.. boiled, and deep-fried with breadcrumbs. Michael Bays of Hollywood… watch out!

But the Scorseses, Kurosawas, Iñárritus or Miyazakis will become premium cinema, relying on human-led storytelling and nuance that machines cannot yet comprehend.

Meanwhile, the audience-pleasing fan-service films will get sloppier and drearier. It’s not Hollywood that is cooked. It’s you.

The AI Defence Strategy

Ever since the United States Department of Justice has been releasing the Epstein files, the internet has been blowing up with “revelations”.

Given the insane and disgust-ridden nature of the files, it can be overwhelming to figure out what has really been going on. And as your senses are overloaded with all this content, a new kind of monster is creeping up on you. I am referring to AI visuals of prominent personalities with Epstein (along with women and underage girls).

These AI visuals are dangerous. A deluge of such images is meant to overwhelm you to the point that you become completely incapable of deciding what is real and what is not. This is the perfect situation for those powerful individuals who have actual incriminating evidence against them from the files.

They can simply claim the real visuals are AI-generated. Many will believe them or simply decide they cannot be sure.

In the past few weeks, we have fact-checked AI visuals showing a young Zohran Mamdani with Epstein and Bill Clinton. Other fact-checkers have debunked AI images claiming to show Epstein alive. And there’s a lot more to come.

The groundwork for the Liar’s Dividend is being laid.

That Matt Shumer post

Matt Shumer, the CEO of OthersideAI, recently published a viral essay titled "Something Big Is Happening". It has sparked significant debate across the tech industry.

He compares the current state of AI to February 2020, the quiet period just before the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the world. He suggests we are currently in the "this seems overblown" phase of a massive global shift.

Key Highlights of Shumer’s Message:

• Shumer made waves by admitting that his own technical skills are becoming obsolete. He described a workflow using GPT-5.3 Codex and Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 where he simply describes a finished product in plain English. He leaves his computer for hours and returns to find the work completed perfectly with zero oversight.

• Unlike previous industrial revolutions that replaced physical labour, Shumer argues that AI is now a general substitute for cognitive labour. If your job happens on a screen, it is at risk.

• In the past, workers could retrain. However, because AI improves across all cognitive fields simultaneously, there is no "safe" niche to move into. The AI is learning that new skill at the same time you are.

• He highlighted that AI is now instrumental in building itself. The Codex team reportedly used early versions of the model to debug its own training. This leads to a compounding effect on progress.

• The future of technology is currently being decided by a very small group. There are roughly a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

His advice for the transition:

Stop treating AI like Google. Push it to perform actual and complex tasks in your daily work. Lean into human factors that AI cannot easily replicate like deep trust and physical presence. Finally, get your financial house in order. He predicts a period of extreme economic volatility as these ripple effects hit the job market through the next few years.

My advice? Do not hand over your critical thinking and creativity to AI. Think for yourself. Read books. Write whatever you can. Paint. Cook. Play some music. It does not matter how bad or good you are at it. Just keep your cognitive functions alive.

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