🎧 AI Warning Signs — How Hollywood Invited the Enemy Inside
Tilly Norwood is the headline. The real story is the jobs collapse already underway
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
Watch on YouTube
Hollywood had its eyes on Web Summit Lisbon this week, where Tilly Norwood creator Eline Van der Velden joined Ankler Media EIC Janice Min to showcase her AI “actress.” But Wild Sheep Content CEO Erik Barmack, our Reel AI columnist, tells Elaine Low, Sean McNulty and Natalie Jarvey that the fixation on Tilly misses the far more consequential story: the unmistakable warning signs of AI’s encroachment and the decades of strategic drift that have left Hollywood uniquely exposed to Big Tech’s ambitions. Which jobs remain genuinely AI-proof? Which ones are already dissolving beneath us? And what does it mean for a creative economy when the apprenticeship ladder that produces future writers, directors and executives is sawed off at the base? Barmack offers a rigorous, unsentimental map of a crisis now unfolding faster and more decisively than the town wants to acknowledge. Plus: David Ellison hosts Paramount Skydance’s debut on Wall Street, and Richard Rushfield charts the steady disappearance of dramatic films from America’s movie screens.
What job collapse? Seriously.
LA jobs with cartels hired by distribution monopolies in bed with governments who prevented hundreds of millions of creators for 100 years from working?
Nobody cares.
What about the literal millions of new creator jobs created in just the last 5 years? No, wait, not millions. Tens of millions.
I know more people in 2025 making 5-6 figures as talent than adding up everyone I knew the prior 20 years.
Obviously folks who politically went out of their way to block creation all of their lives need to be demonetized and shamed.
That is what’s happening now. IMDb is a good place to see lists of folks who literally made sure every day that nobody else could compete — some for 50 years.