Val Kilmer is starring in a film he never shot. Improv actors are selling their emotions at $74 an hour. An AI Andy Cohen is interviewing real people on Peacock. And Google just dropped a vibe design tool that made Figma's stock dip. This episode sits at the intersection of what AI can do, what it probably shouldn't, and what filmmakers actually need.
Quick Take
The through-line across this episode is the gap between what AI can technically do and whether anyone should want it. Val Kilmer's posthumous performance has family consent and union approval behind it, which makes it legible. The Handshake AI improv pipeline is legible too, and we think it will produce generic mush. The AI chatbot journalism stunts have no framework at all. Meanwhile Google is quietly rebuilding Figma's and Replit's entire product category in one release, and Apple is off in a corner shipping research for 3D mesh reconstruction that nobody else seems to be chasing.
What We Debated: Val Kilmer's AI Return in "As Deep as the Grave"
Val Kilmer was cast as Father Fintan in As Deep as the Grave in 2020, five years before his death. He was too sick with throat cancer to shoot a single scene. The production is now reconstructing his performance using archival footage and family-provided images, with his daughter Mercedes and son Jack backing the project. The film follows SAG guidelines and compensates his estate.
We pushed on whether this is categorically different from Ian Holm's reconstructed appearance in Alien: Romulus. The answer we kept landing on: not really. Both involve a deceased actor, family sign-off, and digital recreation. The cleaner comparison people reach for, Paul Walker in Furious 7, doesn't actually work here. Walker had shot most of the film before his death. Kilmer shot nothing. Every frame is generated.
The marketability angle matters more than it gets credit for. This is an indie film, and having Kilmer on the marquee is the difference between a movie that gets distribution and one that doesn't. That's the working calculus for small productions.
What we couldn't evaluate is the performance itself. Nobody has seen it. A deepfake with nothing underneath it is not the same as a performance captured on set and then re-lit. The question of whether the reconstructed Kilmer reads as a character or as an artifact only gets answered when the film releases.
What We Questioned: Handshake AI Pays Improv Actors $74/Hour for Emotion Data
Handshake AI is running Zoom sessions with improv actors to capture emotional performance data at $74 per hour, feeding it into models for "one of the leading AI companies." The company's demand for training data tripled last summer, and it crossed a $150 million run rate in November.
Addy's prediction: this is going to fail at producing what it's ostensibly trying to produce. You cannot mash 1,000 actors' versions of "happiness" into one latent space and get a compelling performance out the other end. You get the average of happiness, which reads as a greeting card. The thing that makes Val Kilmer's happiness different from Tom Cruise's happiness is not a data point you can capture by asking 1,000 people to perform happiness into a webcam. It's the individual.
So where does this data go? We landed on gaming and NPCs as the likely end use. A non-player character in a video game doesn't need to be Daniel Day-Lewis. It needs to emote in a way that reads as human across a broad range of triggers, and generic is actually fine there. For film performance, we don't see it. The individuality of a performance is the asset, and aggregate training is the opposite of that asset.
What We Examined: AI Andy Cohen, Glenn Beck's Washington, and Claude Playing Dario
Peacock has rolled out an AI Andy Cohen chatbot. Glenn Beck sat down for a long interview with an AI George Washington. Vanity Fair ran an interview with Claude while prompting it to pretend to be Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO. We spent this segment asking the same question three times: why.
The Andy Cohen version is the most baffling. Real Andy Cohen is prolific, accessible, and does interviews constantly. The marginal utility of an AI version is unclear even as a novelty.
