Hollywood’s synthetic actor showdown

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Hollywood studios have gone from dismissing AI to pursuing deals with AI personas in only months — and Tilly Norwood is about to check just how far they’ll go.

With a “synthetic actor” nearing agency deals while human talent threatens boycotts, we could be witnessing the entertainment industry’s most uncomfortable transformation yet.

In today’s AI rundown:

• AI actress Tilly Norwood nears talent agency deal

• Apple’s internal ChatGPT-style Siri app

• Construct an AI calendar agent using n8n

• AI ‘workslop’ costing corporations thousands and thousands

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & HOLLYWOOD

🎬 AI actress Tilly Norwood nears agency deal

The Rundown: AI talent studio Xicoia just revealed that its AI actress, Tilly Norwood, is in negotiations with multiple Hollywood talent firms, sparking backlash from actors who called for boycotts of any agencies that sign synthetic performers.

The main points:

• Norwood debuted in a comedy sketch last month, with Xicoia developing unique backstories, voices, and narrative arcs for the character.

• Xicoia is a spin-out of production studio Particle6, with founder Eline Van der Velden wanting Tilly to “be the subsequent Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman”.

• Van der Velden said studios went from dismissing AI to actively pursuing deals in only months, claiming that “the age of synthetic actors isn’t coming, it’s here.”

• Several actors spoke out against the potential talent deal, calling for other performers to drop the agency that signs Norwood.

Why it matters: Between Norwood and AI musician Xania Monet, things are getting weird fast — and no less than some parts of Hollywood look like moving past initial AI hesitations. But given the reactions from actors and former strikes from unions, ‘synthetic actors’ and public personas are going to be a VERY polarizing topic.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

🛑 Don’t SOC-block your best engineers

The Rundown: Vanta uses AI and automation to get you compliant fast, simplify your audit process, and unblock deals — so you possibly can prove to customers that you just take security seriously.

Make Vanta your compliance co-pilot and:

• Get SOC 2 ready without pulling engineers off product

• Automate evidence collection and streamline audit processes

• Unblock enterprise deals with security credibility that sales

• Access expert support at every stage, from startup to scale-up

Get compliant fast with Vanta – trusted by top startups like Cursor, Linear, and Replit.

APPLE

🍎 Apple’s internal ChatGPT-style Siri app

The Rundown: Apple has developed an internal chatbot codenamed “Veritas” that employees are using to stress-test for Siri’s AI overhaul, based on Bloomberg, with the corporate scrambling to salvage its voice assistant upgrade after massive delays.

The main points:

• Veritas allows Apple’s AI division to experiment with capabilities like searching personal data and editing photos with voice commands.

• The ChatGPT-like app is testing the “Linwood” system, which utilizes each Apple’s in-house models and third-party options.

• Engineering problems pushed the unique AI-powered Siri launch to March 2026, prompting executive reshuffles and a talent drain to other AI labs.

• Apple is reportedly not planning to launch Veritas as a standalone app like competitors, as a substitute just embedding the features into Siri directly.

Why it matters: Apple doesn’t appear to wish to compete within the chatbot market directly, and given each the insane level of competition and the tech giant’s current AI issues, that looks like the proper move. But March is coming fast — and with Apple bleeding talent and the industry continuing to level up, the situation still feels dire.

AI TRAINING

📆 Construct an AI calendar agent using n8n

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn construct an AI calendar agent in n8n that schedules events for you directly in your calendar using natural language commands as a substitute of forms and date pickers.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to n8n.io, create your account, click “Create workflow,” and press Tab so as to add an AI Agent node to the canvas

2. Configure the AI Agent by choosing a chat model (GPT-4o mini), adding Google Calendar as a tool, and authenticating with OAuth credentials

3. Set the tool description to “Create calendar events” and add the present date/time to the system message using “{$now}” for correct context

4. Test by typing “Schedule dinner for tonight from 7 to 9 p.m.” within the chat panel and confirm the event appears in your Google Calendar

Pro Tip: Take this workflow further by connecting to WhatsApp or Telegram so you possibly can message your agent as a substitute of opening n8n.

PRESENTED BY ASSEMBLY AI

🎙️ Calling all Voice AI Builders

The Rundown: AssemblyAI is the speech-to-text API behind the subsequent generation of Voice AI apps, including corporations like Granola, Cluely, and Dovetail. With high accuracy and low latency, it’s an industry-leading infrastructure for constructing scalable Conversational AI.

With one API, you’ll get:

• Accurate transcription at 93.3%

• Pay as you go from $0.15/hr

• Unlimited concurrency

Start constructing with AssemblyAI.

AI RESEARCH

💼 AI ‘workslop’ costing corporations thousands and thousands

The Rundown: Stanford and BetterUp Labs surveyed 1,100+ U.S. employees about AI “workslop,” polished but hole outputs that shift real work to other employees, finding that 41% of respondents encountered such content within the last month.

The main points:

• The research found that workslop forced recipients to spend a median of 116 minutes decoding or redoing each bit.

• Respondents estimated that 15.4% of content now qualifies as workslop, with BetterUp calculating an invisible tax of $186/mo per employee in lost productivity.

• Skilled services and tech sectors face the best concentrations, with workslop flowing primarily between colleagues and lesser so to managers.

• The research also investigated the collaboration impacts, with recipients finding colleagues who sent workslop less trustworthy, reliable, and artistic.

Why it matters: AI is ripping through the workplace — but like we’ve seen within the education system, many are selecting to dump cognitive tasks entirely as a substitute of using the tech as a collaborative tool. With adoption rising alongside AI model capabilities, workslop may soon3 turn out to be each more prevalent and even harder to identify.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Notion Agent– A Notion power user that understands the best way you’re employed, handling multi-step tasks and saving hours with one prompt*

• 🎆 HunyuanImage 3.0 – Tencent’s latest open-source text-to-image model

• 🗞️ ChatGPT Pulse – Proactive, personalized morning briefings

• ⚙️ Factory – Software development agent with top scores on Terminal-Bench

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Meta poached one other major AI researcher from OpenAI, with Yang Song leaving to be the brand new research principal at MSL under Shengjia Zhao (also formerly at OpenAI).

Tencent open-sourced HunyuanImage 3.0, a brand new text-to-image model that the corporate says compares to the industry’s top closed options.

Google released latest updates to its Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite models, with upgrades including agentic tool performance, efficiency, and instruction following.

Exa released exa-code, a tool that helps AI coding assistants find hyper-relevant web context to significantly reduce LLM hallucinations.

OpenAI’s latest Applications CEO, Fidji Simo, is reportedly recruiting a brand new executive to guide monetization and promoting efforts for ChatGPT.

AI image startup Black Forest Labs is reportedly set to boost as much as $300M in a brand new round that may push the German company’s valuation to $4B.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Darren J. in Spartanburg, SC:

“I take advantage of AI as a coach, particularly for tasks I’m afraid to tackle. I’ll discover a goal, create a separate chat in ChatGPT, after which say, “I would like to work for half-hour day-after-day; I would like you to guide me in every step of the method. Be my cheerleader but additionally a really honest critic.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: ChatGPT gets proactive with Pulse

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Amazon fined $2.5B for Prime ‘trickery’

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Norway’s 1X to boost $1B

• Today’s AI tool guide: Construct an AI calendar agent using n8n

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM Friday: Vibe coding in Cursor for non-devs 

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown