Marion Cotillard on AI actors: 'for now they act like potatoes'

Katzenberg's 2,377-word essay: 'the tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap'

Jeffrey Katzenberg's essay on X tells Hollywood to negotiate AI terms of credit, consent and compensation, but it names no rate, license or opt-out and does not disclose his own AI video investments.

Jeffrey Katzenberg posted a roughly 2,400-word essay to X on 23 September, the only post his account has ever made, and its thesis fits in one line: "The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap." Hollywood should accept that AI is not going away, he writes, and spend its energy on the terms instead. He asks AI developers to include artists "with credit, with consent, and with compensation," and he is frank that jobs go, citing pit musicians and DreamWorks' own exit from hand-drawn animation.

What the essay does not contain is a single term. There is no rate, no licensing model, no opt-out and no view on work that has already been scraped, because in his own sequencing the fairness debate comes later. It also leaves out his interests: his firm WndrCo invested in the AI video company Reactor and backs the animation tool Cartwheel, and The Information reported on 9 September that he is forming an AI video company with former Sora head Bill Peebles. That report is unconfirmed, and the company has no public name.

In practice, treat his three words as a spec and ask for the numbers: credit that a model actually documents, consent before training rather than an opt-out after it, and a figure per work or per use. The next place those terms get written is animation, where the Animation Guild contract expires on 31 July 2027 with its generative AI priorities, in the guild's own words, "not fully answered."

China is building AI video like it built EVs: subsidised rent, computing vouchers and state-backed AI film studios

Chinese local AI video subsidies mostly pay after a title is live and scale with views. The biggest named compute voucher is capped near $2,990 a title, and no city publishes how many it has paid.

Reuters compared China's push into AI video to the playbook it used for electric vehicles and solar panels. The schemes we checked tell a more useful story, because most of the money is paid for hits. Beijing's Huairou district refunds 30% of a title's compute bill, capped at 20,000 yuan (about $2,990), and only once the title is live and the producer can show receipts. Hangzhou's Shangcheng district offers up to 300,000 yuan a work with play counts as a review criterion, and Guangzhou's Baiyun base gives free rent only to teams that already have a title past 10 million plays.

Volume is not the scarce thing. China's broadcast regulator counted 430,000 micro-dramas released from January to August, more than 90% of them made with AI, while CCTV reported that the going rate for a minute of standard AI drama fell from 5,000 yuan to a few hundred in six months. Upfront help does exist, such as 50 rent-free desks in Haikou, but no city publishes how many vouchers it has actually paid.

In practice, if you make AI film outside China, the benchmark you are priced against is a flood almost nobody watches. Brand-commissioned work there still sells for 10,000 to 20,000 yuan a minute, so story, IP and a paying client are the moat, not compute.

Sources: Reuters (25 Sep), Huairou district rules (14 Apr), the regulator's briefing (17 Sep) and CCTV via Jiemian (6 Sep). Dollar figures are converted at about 6.7 yuan to the dollar.

Higgsfield open-sources ANERNEQ, a 20-minute Arctic drama, with every prompt and asset public

Higgsfield's ANERNEQ notes are a detailed AI filmmaking manual, but no license is stated and the culture they call invented borrows Chukchi words, an Inuit title and a real sacred site with no one credited.

Higgsfield released ANERNEQ, a 20-minute Arctic drama, on 28 September and called it open source, with every prompt and asset public. What it published is a long, candid production manual on its own platform, and no license appears on the page, the film or the launch posts.

The manual is worth your time. Seedance 2.5 generated every shot and every spoken line, Claude wrote each prompt from a custom skill file, and Blender handled previs, the rough 3D blocking done before anything is generated. The rules transfer to any model: write every prompt as if the model has never seen your film, direct with a goal, an obstacle and a tactic instead of emotion words, and cut until the frame looks real. Higgsfield also says that writing dialogue in Cyrillic inside an English prompt stops the model laying English phonetics over the words, a claim nobody outside the company has tested yet.

The notes call the culture on screen a composite and the language invented. The film is set in 1920s Chukotka, home to living Chukchi and Siberian Yupik communities, and several core words match Chukchi dictionary entries. The title is the Inuit word anirniq, "breath; soul", and the sacred Whale Bone Alley is Whale Alley on Yttygran Island, a real ritual site recorded by archaeologists in 1976. No Chukchi, Yupik or Inuit consultant, speaker or adviser is credited anywhere.

In practice, the directing habits are free to take. The believability they produce here came from a real people, and a creator who credits a language speaker or cultural adviser is doing the one thing an 11,961-generation pipeline did not.

Source: Higgsfield project page and launch posts, 28 September 2026.