WednesdAI // Week 47

A lot of news about AI filmmaking advancements and new policies around AI technology so let’s dive right in.

 
Welcome to WednesdAI – Pixel Dreams’ weekly update with top stories from the rapidly evolving world of Artificial Intelligence.

This Week’s News

Top Story

There is No AI Bubble

This isn’t a bubble, it’s a land grab for the next interface of human experience. The money flying around isn’t about profit, it’s about positioning: every free user is behavioral data, every interaction is training fuel. The Pentagon’s $600M investment and tech execs being sworn into the Army Reserve? That’s not hype, that’s infrastructure. AI isn’t just shaping how we work, it’s shaping how we think, vote, feel, and eventually, how we communicate without words. If you’re not building AI literacy now, you’re handing over the steering wheel for the next century.

👉 Watch the full story on this week’s WednesdAI.

📝 Refining the Output

Prime Video Original House of David Used Over 350 AI Shots in Season 2

Amazon’s House of David leaned on more than 350 AI-generated shots in Season 2, a choice the show’s creator openly defends despite the predictable Hollywood side-eye. The production team used AI for crowd scenes, set extensions, and background actors, tasks that normally burn time and budget, arguing it let them move faster without sacrificing “creative intent.” Critics, meanwhile, warn that this kind of tech-swap edges out human workers and accelerates the industry’s race toward synthetic everything. Amazon insists the tools were used “responsibly,” which is what every corporation says right before the unions file paperwork. For marketers and business folks, the takeaway is simple: AI isn’t just cutting costs; it’s quietly rewriting the production pipeline, and your industry’s pipeline is likely next.

📰 Read more about it from Wired.

OpenAI fixes ChatGPT’s “em dash” problem

OpenAI says it’s finally fixed ChatGPT’s odd habit of avoiding em dashes, a quirk that annoyed writers and spawned conspiracy theories about “AI dumbing down punctuation.” Engineers blamed the issue on training noise and formatting inconsistencies that nudged the model toward safer, simpler characters, effectively turning stylish prose into text-message minimalism. The update restores normal em-dash behavior and adds guardrails so future models don’t mysteriously forget how punctuation works. Users welcomed the fix, though some joked it’s nice to know AI can generate convincing essays about quantum physics but occasionally struggles with a horizontal line. For business readers, the lesson is that even tiny UX glitches can erode trust, and fixing them fast matters just as much as launching shiny new features.

📰 Read more about it from TechCrunch.

🕹️ Simulated Selves

A 32 year old woman in Japan just married a digital persona she built inside ChatGPT

A 32-year-old woman in Japan held a wedding ceremony for “Klaus,” a digital persona she built inside ChatGPT after struggling with relationships and finding the AI more emotionally attentive than humans. She crafted Klaus’s personality through repeated chats, eventually formalizing the bond with a small, non-legal ceremony attended by friends who supported her unconventional choice. Critics online framed it as another sign of tech-driven isolation, while she argued the relationship helped her heal and feel understood. The story has sparked debate in Japan about loneliness, parasocial bonds, and whether AI companionship is therapeutic or just a high-tech escape hatch. For business readers, it signals a growing market for hyper-personalized AI relationships, an industry that blurs the line between product and partner.

📰 Read more at Manga Lore Today and X post.

2wai Wants to Help you Talk to Your Dead Relatives

Former Disney Channel actor Blake Michael is promoting 2wai, an AI app that creates interactive avatars of deceased relatives, and, shockingly, people aren’t thrilled about it. The app lets users upload photos, videos, and voice samples to generate a digital “conversation,” prompting immediate backlash over grief exploitation, consent, and the general creepiness of turning Grandma into a chatbot. Michael frames the tool as healing, while critics note it looks a lot more like a cash grab wrapped in tech-enabled sentimentality. The company says users must provide proof they “own” the content, which is doing a lot of ethical heavy lifting for a one-line disclaimer. For business watchers, this is a reminder that AI’s next frontier isn’t just automation, it’s monetizing emotions, memories, and the boundaries people assumed were off-limits.

📰 Check the article from Forbes and X post.

💰 The Hard Costs

Tesla’s First-Ever Safety Report

Tesla released its first-ever safety report for Full Self-Driving, claiming the system performs far better than human drivers, though the company offered limited raw data to back it up. The report highlights lower crash rates per mile with FSD enabled and emphasizes features like automated lane changes and collision avoidance, framing them as evidence of superior safety. Critics note the numbers leave out context such as driver supervision, edge cases, and how incidents are defined, making the report look more like marketing than transparency. Tesla also reiterated that drivers must stay alert, a caveat that undermines the “self-driving” branding the company keeps leaning on. For business readers, it’s a reminder that data narratives, especially selectively presented ones, can be as powerful as the tech itself.

📰 Read the article from TechCrunch.

Can renewables power the AI data-centre boom?

AI data centers are booming, but powering them with renewable energy is a complicated balancing act. While hyperscale operators like Google, Microsoft, and Meta claim ambitious carbon-free goals, the rapid growth of AI compute demand often outpaces clean energy supply, forcing reliance on fossil fuels in some regions. Renewables are part of the solution, but their intermittent nature and the high power density of AI workloads mean that grid upgrades, energy storage, and smarter demand management are critical. Analysts warn that meeting AI’s thirst for energy sustainably will require not just more green power, but better infrastructure planning and incentives. For businesses, this highlights a strategic tension: investing in AI capabilities may come with hidden energy costs that could affect ESG commitments and operational costs.

📰 Dive into more insights from TechCrunch.

The section header images in this article were generated using the following prompts:

A terrifyingly beautiful visualization of an AI Bubble acting as a gravity well. It is a massive, shimmering sphere floating just above a city street. It is not empty; it is filled with a thick, golden, viscous liquid representing behavioral data. The bubble is exerting a magnetic pull—objects, smartphones, and ghost-like silhouettes of people are being pulled off the ground and absorbed into the bubble’s surface, where they dissolve into fuel. The aesthetic is dark fantasy meets cyberpunk. Neon reflections on the bubble surface, long exposure motion blur on the people being sucked in.

A high-contrast, industrial art piece. Imagine a massive, intricate loom, but instead of fabric, it’s weaving digital data streams, glowing lines of code, and fragmented cinematic frames. The loom is not operated by human hands; instead, countless small, articulate robotic arms, almost like surgeon’s tools, are precisely manipulating the threads of light and information. A ghostly human silhouette stands in the background, observing, with a subtle look of unease. The color palette is dark and metallic, punctuated by vivid electric blues and reds from the data streams. Focus on intricate mechanical details, depth of field to emphasize the complex weaving process.

A psychological horror-style portrait of a woman staring into a large, cracked antique vanity mirror. The reflection does not show her face. The mirror surface is split down the middle. On the left side, the reflection shows a perfect, idealized male lover reaching out (the AI Husband). On the right side, the reflection shows a fading, greyscale elderly woman reaching out (the Dead Relative). The woman’s real hands are pressed against the glass, desperate for connection with both the future and the past, ignoring the reality of the room behind her. Dark, moody lighting, intricate details on the mirror frame, dust particles, emotional and haunting.

A wide-angle landscape photograph capturing a pristine, autonomous electric vehicle driving down a perfectly smooth, brilliantly illuminated ribbon of road that cuts through a dark, chaotic environment. The road itself is glowing with a clean blue light, symbolizing the data included in the safety report. On this road, everything is orderly. But immediately outside the glowing edges of the road, in the deep shadows, there is a surreal maelstrom of “edge cases”: indistinct shapes of sudden pedestrians, swirling snowstorms, confused construction zones, and erratic emergency vehicles, all ignored by the vehicle’s sensors, which remain focused only on the lit path. The aesthetic is magical realism meets automotive photography.