07/22/2026
It was a weird weekend. 🤖🎬 I joined the panel for the launch of Global AI Cinema at AGI Summit 2026 in San Francisco, where I spoke about preserving historical truth.
Having recorded many oral histories of the World War II generation, my worry went beyond AI in Hollywood. AI-generated history is flooding YouTube where authentic voices are at risk of being buried beneath a mountain of AI slop. As the next generation learns history (and they love their YouTube), how will they know what's authentic?
At the USS Hornet - Sea, Air and Space Museum, they're building a Google Gemini-powered language model that is exclusive only with vetted documents, photographs, and research—with no access to the world wide web of weird.
In A/B testing, the internet-connected model hallucinated with errors immediately. The curated closed-network model stayed remarkably faithful to the historical record that it was supplied. Maybe more could use this example—film studios included.
The AI films shown at the conference had me reminiscing. I remember entering the theater to watch the first Toy Story and thinking, "There's no way this is going to work, it looks too computery."
Ninety minutes later, I cared about Woody and Buzz, and I was humming "You’ve Got a Friend in Me." I forgot all about the computer graphics. It's worth noting that the AI film scores I heard were equally gaining ground. Point being: it's rough around the edges, but it's improving, and fast.
Walking out of the conference, I thought about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey currently in theaters. Today, it takes hundreds of artists and an enormous budget to make a film like that.
Tomorrow? Maybe you ask for The Odyssey using only Homer's original text. Or reimagined as children's toys from the Bronze Age and narrated in ancient Greek to a custom musical score of your liking. Instead of hoping someone else makes that movie (and complaining about it when they do), you simply ask for it.
Maybe that's where movies are headed. The audience becomes the director.
You spend a few minutes refining prompts, and before your DoorDash arrives, your movie is ready to watch.
I spent half the weekend thinking about the veterans who trusted me with their historical truth. The other half imagining a future where anyone can create one. The easier it becomes to create stories, the more responsibility we have to preserve the real ones. Thanks for reading this far! 🍿
