OpenAI’s Critterz blowback: Year zero for Hollywood

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

KLEVEROV: I’m very much not of the “Hollywood is dead” narrative, because storytelling is hard, and making really great storytelling that transcends is still at the heart of it. A lot of media would just love to say, “See, everyone hates AI, and it’s terrible, and we shouldn’t do it anymore.” People were pre-boycotting our film before it even existed. But the truth is, the tools are here, and they’re being implemented into the way we do things, and that is only going to grow from here.

SAFIAN: That’s Nik Kleverov, chief creative officer of Native Foreign and director of Critters, one of the first feature films being built primarily with AI. I spoke with Nik at the Cannes Lions Festival, not to be confused with the Cannes Film Festival, where Critters was initially slated to have its world premiere until OpenAI abruptly shut down Sora, which he’d been relying on. I wanted to speak with Nik about the realities of working with unpredictable new tools like Sora, as well as adopting AI video at scale in an industry that’s been publicly hostile and privately tepid about the technology. Nik breaks down how much AI video has improved from what he calls the Stone Age of 2022, what its evolution means for the entertainment and advertising worlds, and why human talent is more in demand than ever when it comes to impactful storytelling. Nik also talks about how he reckons with the darker side of deepfakes when it comes to AI videos. And just to note, this conversation wasn’t recorded or edited using AI. It’s as real as it gets. So let’s get to it.

I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Nik Kleverov, the chief creative officer of Native Foreign and director of the AI-animated feature Critters. Nik, thanks for being here.

KLEVEROV: Thanks for having me, Bob. Appreciate it.

Copy LinkHow Critters became an early test case for AI filmmaking

SAFIAN: I am low-key obsessed with AI video, not as a practitioner like you, but as an observer. Your film Critters was initially slated to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

KLEVEROV: Yeah, right about now.

SAFIAN: Yeah, but it got derailed a little bit by technical issues. Or was it that the Cannes film folks don’t really like AI?

KLEVEROV: Interesting you should mention that, because the answer is, of course, that the core technology we were building the film with went away in the middle of making the film. But I do remember when we made the announcement late last fall that, hey, OpenAI is backing our film, so on and so forth. There was almost a pre-boycott. I was reading through it. There were French groups and people saying, “No, we will not have this at Cannes.” It was like, well, yeah, OK. We were obviously also thinking you can’t guarantee that you’re going to play at the Cannes Film Festival. So it was more of an OpenAI endeavor that we were embarking on.

SAFIAN: But you were able to get in there.

KLEVEROV: Sure, yeah.

SAFIAN: But the initial film idea came from a short that came out of OpenAI, right?

KLEVEROV: That’s right. In the Stone Age of 2022 of AI video, shortly after DALL-E came out, which is OpenAI’s text-to-image platform, we actually pitched them a short film idea. After my partner, Chad Nelson, and I created this world of Critters, we pitched them this idea of, “OK, well, what if we did a float-through of this beautiful forest with all these critters?” So you get that tech demo part of it handled. It starts as a bit of a David Attenborough Planet Earth, and you’re hearing this omniscient narrator talk about this majestic world. But then, once we meet the critters and see them in their natural environment, it becomes a Monty Python sketch, where it’s like, no, you’re all wrong. That’s actually not what we’re doing here. It’s just really irreverent, silly bickering back and forth between the characters on-screen and this voiceover.

And that was it. It was a super simple five-minute short. It ended up being much more successful than we had ever imagined. I think we pitched it in the winter of ’22, then made it over holiday break, and released it for the one-year anniversary of DALL-E, which was April of ’23. People really liked it and were curious about the process. Remember, back then, yes, it was generated with AI, but all the video was traditional. It was Unreal Engine, it was After Effects, and it was all these tools that we all know in the industry and use. So really, the generative part of it was the creation of these characters and the world. Everything else was the way that we do creative.

SAFIAN: And when you moved to making it feature-length, you started using more generative tools. That’s when you started using Sora?

KLEVEROV: Well, yeah, because if you look at the timeline, in ’23 we released it. Sora was announced in spring of ’24. So between ’23 and ’24, the Critters film actually created a good relationship between Native Foreign, my company, and OpenAI. We were doing creative work for them, agency work. Then they were like, “Hey, we’re going to go multimodal. Are you interested in testing this out?” So I was playing with Sora before it had a name, and I was one of the initial — they call us the Sora Seven, as if we went to the moon, which is silly.

When they came out in March ’24 with that announcement, it was the seven of us who had each made a little short film or something. I decided to take the lane of brand storyteller, because that is still the core business of what Native Foreign does, and that is where we came from. I luckily met the CMO of Toys R Us at an event, and she was like, “Oh, we’re looking at exploring this new tech.” And I was like, “Well, let’s do something together.” So I was able to get signoff from both OpenAI and Toys R Us, and we came together and made the first-ever AI commercial, which was for Toys R Us. That is really when the video started. So if you’re thinking timeline, that was only two years ago and change.

Copy LinkWhy brands are moving faster than Hollywood on AI video

SAFIAN: And Hollywood has been somewhat resistant to anything AI-related.

KLEVEROV: Of course.

SAFIAN: Are brands more open to it? Are they a little less precious? Does that allow you to use this more?

KLEVEROV: Brands are precious, but I think there is something in advertising that’s always been true, which is that it’s a great place for innovation. You’re telling a very targeted story. Usually, if we’re speaking visual language, a commercial that’s 30 or 60 seconds long, you’ve got a specific product or a CTA that you want to talk about. It’s a great place for that. Also, you can get around some of the limitations of the tech. The Toys R Us piece was all text-to-video, so everything in that spot I had to type out. My vocabulary got better. I was trying to write, OK, a kid with wire-frame round glasses, with a blue-and-white checkered shirt.

SAFIAN: Very different creative process.

KLEVEROV: It’s completely different. You have to be very malleable. You have to roll with the punches a little bit. Then the challenge for us as professional storytellers is, how do we maintain that creative control that we’ve gotten really good at? And brands, too—everybody comes into a commercial knowing exactly what they want. They’re looking at the boards, and they’re looking at the frame. So how do we figure out that process while also being honest about where the tools are? They’re evolving every day, of course, but from when we started to where we are now, there’s been such incredible progress. It is funny that you have to roll with the serendipity of the process a little bit more.

Copy LinkWhat happens when a core AI tool disappears mid-production

SAFIAN: When Sora got pulled, which is what slowed your roll a little bit with Critters, were you surprised? Did you get early insight on that the same way you got early insight on it coming out?

KLEVEROV: I’d love to say I was that cool, but no. Unfortunately, we found out around the time everyone else did. It was an interesting day, because being in the middle of something—and of course, having always been big fans of OpenAI and being tied to that tech—was an interesting challenge for us as filmmakers. I think it’s a great case study for where we are in this world, because here we are pushing one of the first features, especially animated and four-quadrant-type projects, forward, and then boop, our main technology goes away or becomes obsolete. Granted, they were keeping the API open for us and everything. But at the same time, we have to really think about the process and say, “OK, well, does it make sense to use something that’s not going to be supported several months down the line? Or do we take some of the calls?” Because, of course, everyone did call that day. There were plenty of companies that wanted to work on it with us, and we were, at the time, for that project only, doing an exclusive. That’s where we’re at now. So we partnered with AGC, and we brought the film to Cannes Film Festival, not necessarily to sell it, but actually just to start the conversations.

SAFIAN: So it’s not the full film. It’s pieces of the film that you could bring.

KLEVEROV: Pieces of the film that we brought and were showing.

SAFIAN: And those pieces were done on Sora? Or were they redone using some of the new other tools?

KLEVEROV: Both. So there was a lot on Sora. And then, in the time between March and May, we said, “OK, let’s start rebuilding and doing some new camera tests.” We call them camera tests even though they’re model tests. It’s like, “OK, what does this lens look like? What does that lens look like?” But by lenses, I mean the generative programs.

SAFIAN: And each one is different.

KLEVEROV: Of course.

SAFIAN: And the way you use it is different.

KLEVEROV: The crazy thing is 10 different people can sit down with the same tool and get different results. So when people say, “Humans aren’t important anymore, the tools are all the same,” it’s absolutely untrue. Depending on which creative is at the steering wheel, you get very different outputs.

SAFIAN: Just as having the same camera doesn’t mean you end up with the same film.

KLEVEROV: Look, there’s a lot of talk about democratization and all that, but I will also say everyone’s got a camera in their pocket. And how many 13-year-olds are making the next masterpiece film? There’s some truth to the idea that there will be undiscovered talent from all over the world that finally has a shot and is going to do a lot of stuff. But I’m very much not of the Hollywood-is-dead narrative, because storytelling is hard, and making really great storytelling that transcends is still hard.

Copy LinkWhy human taste and storytelling still shape the final result

SAFIAN: There are folks in the AI video world who looked at Critters as, like, “Oh, this sort of opens the door for us to do other kinds of things.” There’s pressure in that, in some ways, for you.

KLEVEROV: Well, the first one through the door gets the spears. Being the first to do anything, yes, you get support, but you also get a lot of angry people. People were pre-boycotting our film before it even existed. So I do think we’re being watched by everyone. Everyone wants to see how it does. If things don’t go well, I think there’s a lot of media that would just love to say, “See, everyone hates AI, and it’s terrible, and we shouldn’t do it anymore.” But the truth is, the tools are here, and they’re being implemented into the way we do things. And that is only going to grow from here.

SAFIAN: Toy Story was a seminal moment of a certain technology. And in some ways, Critters is the standard-bearer for this, which you’re smiling about. You like that idea, but it’s —

KLEVEROV: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. But what I will say is, some of the best things we heard when we were playing it for potential partners at Cannes were, “Oh, I forgot I was watching AI halfway through.” And that’s exactly what we want. We just want to tell a really great story and have AI not even be thought of by most people. I don’t want them to think about AI when they’re watching. I just want them to watch a great movie.

SAFIAN: So when you’re creating, for folks who aren’t doing this, there’s the AI piece of it, there’s the human piece of it in the creative, as you’re talking about it, and then there’s the audience reaction to it. So where does the AI start and end? Where does the human start and end? And is it important that the audience know that it was created with AI or not?

KLEVEROV: I think it depends on who you ask. To me, it’s not important. I just want to tell this really great story that wouldn’t have been possible to tell before, because it just would’ve cost many hundreds of millions of dollars before. And now we’re down to a fraction of that. What AI tools are doing is allowing smaller teams to bat above their weight, with really great professionals coming together and unifying around a cause. And I think humans are at the forefront of every decision.

There’s a human in the loop at every key creative junction. And I don’t want anyone to forget that none of this would happen without us. There is a whole different narrative going on, which is, “Hey, I made 10,000 commercials in 30 seconds with the click of a button,” and that’s not the lane I’m playing in. And I know that some will. I’m not interested in that.

Copy LinkHow AI can lower costs while preserving authorship and IP

SAFIAN: Yeah, there’s lowering the floor and then there’s raising the ceiling. As you’re talking about it, it sounds like you’re looking for the projects that you couldn’t afford to do, or that maybe no one could afford to do, right?

KLEVEROV: Yeah. And Native Foreign started as a brand storytelling, essentially a service company, but we fully transitioned into building IP. We are building IP in the age of AI. Critters is one of our flagship products. We have another series that we’re doing with one of the Modern Family writer-producers. And so that’s very exciting to me, because I was always the filmmaker, the storyteller kid, and I’ve always wanted to do movies and projects. We’re finally entering an era where you can.

SAFIAN: And are there any complications or concerns about the IP, about who owns it or how it’s owned, when what you’re creating is what the model is creating?

KLEVEROV: So the original Critters short is one of the first AI shorts to get US copyright. And we did that because we kept very good track of the human authorship that went into every piece of the design.

SAFIAN: Tracking while you were doing it.

KLEVEROV: Manually tracking.

SAFIAN: Manually tracking.

KLEVEROV: So saying, “OK, here were our first outputs. Then we changed the eyes 20 times,” and we screen-grabbed and tracked that. Then we were basically making our own PDFs and our own documents. And our legal firm really liked that, because that is the firepower they used to go get that copyright. Now, that was all an experiment. In fact, this whole thing is an experiment. But now that we have a plan, and we got the Paddington writers involved, we’re thinking bigger. We’ve hired some really exceptional character designers and world designers. So every character now is hand-drawn before it goes to video, before it goes to animation. All the worlds are hand-drawn.

SAFIAN: So you’re creating that IP by hand, although some of those artists may be using digital tools in their work.

KLEVEROV: But where do you draw the line? Because at some point Photoshop was considered disruptive. So I think where we’re at now is an echo of that.

SAFIAN: I love listening to Nik Kleverov talk about his evolving creative process with AI. So why does Hollywood see AI as a moral threat to storytelling? And what happens when the tech gets applied to purposes decidedly less charming than the Critters movie? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, director Nik Kleverov took us inside the creation of the first AI-assisted animated feature. Now he talks about how AI is remaking video production across film and advertising, why 2026 is year zero for mass adoption in Hollywood, and a possible solution for the risk of deepfakes. Let’s jump back in.

SAFIAN: In other realms, AI is looked at as this incredible efficiency area where things can be done faster. Does it hit more in preproduction, in production, in postproduction, or is that whole sequence different?

KLEVEROV: I’ve always had the hot take that the editor is the new director. So post is really your command-and-control center, where everything happens. And now, in the age of AI, you really are building in the edit. So pre is post, and post is pre, and production is pre and post, and it has all melded together, even in the instances where you’re still going to shoot, which we still do.

So many of the things we do for brands are: create a campaign, do basically previs of it, or what we call pre-FX, then know what we’re going to do, know what we’re going to go shoot, and then go shoot that thing. The other thing I’ve really enjoyed is working with really seasoned cinematographers and gaffers who are also now starting to use the tools and say, “Hey, Nik, here’s how I’m going to light this scene. Here’s what I’m thinking for the composition. I want to do a camera move like this. How do we do it? How do we pull it off?” And that’s pretty exciting.

Copy LinkWhy post production is becoming the center of AI filmmaking

SAFIAN: But it means that in post, or when you’re editing, if you look and say, “Oh, I wish I had shot it this way,” you now can, essentially.

KLEVEROV: 100%. My entire career, especially as an editor, I was like, “Oh my God, why didn’t the camera people shoot this thing?” Or on stuff I’ve directed, I’m like, “Oh my God, why didn’t I get that? I’m so dumb. I should have gotten that.” Now you just can.

SAFIAN: I find with other AI that I use sometimes, because it’s so easy, seemingly, to get more variation, I can go down a rabbit hole and keep trying to create new things. So I’m curious how that works for you, because you can think, “Oh, let’s try this one. What if we did it this way?” And that can expand.

KLEVEROV: You have to have restraint. I think this is where creative direction and vision come in really critically, because you can meander forever. As the tools have gotten better, the ratio has gotten better. When I was doing Toys R Us, I think I was doing 1,000-to-1 ratios. Some shots I literally made 1,000 generations of before I got to one that was decent enough that I still had to finish out in VFX. Now we’re maybe 5-to-1, 10-to-1, depending on whether we’ve established a really strong key frame of what we’re able to do. So things have gotten much more efficient. But yeah, there’s a serendipity, and you have to be malleable enough, but you also have to keep it on the rails. That’s an interesting balance.

SAFIAN: It’s only been a few years that we’ve had these capabilities in this way. How far along are we? How fast is it changing?

KLEVEROV: In many ways, and you talked about Hollywood studios earlier, we’ve been having discussions for a long time, but 2026 really seems like year zero, where people are saying, “OK, we’re going to try some stuff out now. We’re going to actually move forward and make things happen.” So I think we’re just at the beginning. There’s been a lot of sorting out that’s had to happen, and it’s go time.

Copy LinkHow fast-moving tools are changing production timelines and adoption

SAFIAN: I had a conversation with Chris Valenzuela, I guess, at Runway. And I was asking, “What is your planning process for what’s next?” And he’s like, “I change that every couple of weeks. It just moves so fast.” Which must make it hard for you when you’re working on a project that’s going to take longer, because you don’t know how the tools are going to change.

KLEVEROV: Look at what happened with Critters. We thought that was a sure thing. Luckily, a lot of the projects we’ve done with AI, the Virgin Voyages work and other pieces, have a two- to three-month timeline. So you can lock into a tool and say, “OK, we’re going to use this set of tools for this period of time. And even if an update happens, we’re just going to finish this project, call it wrapped, and move on.”

SAFIAN: And the Sora experience didn’t make you say, “Oh, I’ve got to have my own tools. I can’t use somebody else’s.”

KLEVEROV: No. There are so many smart people who are so well funded making these tools. I don’t even want to enter that landscape. I think let them do what they’re great at, and just try to continue forming great partnerships and lock in. And again, we could have finished the film with Sora if we wanted to, but it’s a choice we’re making now because we don’t have to. But if I had to, then I would.

SAFIAN: Right. You must spend a lot of your time trying to keep up, or figure out what’s new and what’s coming.

KLEVEROV: It’s impossible. I’m in all these WhatsApp groups. I’m always getting news pings about this, that, and the other. And sometimes you’re like, “Oh, this is the tool that we really needed,” and it just got released at the finish of a project. The other thing is sometimes the demos are a bit deceiving, and you’re like, “Oh, we tried that. It didn’t quite work as advertised, but all right, it’s a step forward.”

SAFIAN: And what it takes to be an expert in using tool A, does that necessarily translate into making you an expert at using tool B? Do you have to learn a new language each time?

KLEVEROV: That’s interesting. If you know how to use AI, or you know how to think about AI, you’re good. You then just have to start understanding what the different models are good at, and then what your special witches’ brews are for how you put things together and create your own unique voice.

Copy LinkWhy advertising is becoming Hollywood’s AI proving ground

SAFIAN: How do you feel the world of brand work and AI is the same as or different from what’s happening in Hollywood?

KLEVEROV: I think brands are the first to take chances on some of the AI stuff. They’ve been quicker to publicly adopt things and put them out. But I think Hollywood, of course, has to think really big and think about the future and all of their relationships with guilds and this and that. So I think it’s a whole different world to untangle.

SAFIAN: It’s interesting that the creative world, or what traditionally has been called the creative world, is going to learn from the commercial world as opposed to the other way around.

KLEVEROV: That’s right.

SAFIAN: Do you consider yourself an artist, a businessperson? You do both.

KLEVEROV: Yes. It is interesting because, a little side story, my father was a famous artist in Soviet Russia. And he painted work that was critical of the Soviet government. He had a pretty tough life. He went to jail. It was a whole thing. He got out of Soviet Russia and got to America. I actually spent my early childhood in Brooklyn, then moved to LA. He tried to teach me how to paint. I was never able to, but I was the kid with a camera, filming everything, making my own little movies, editing in camera. So I’ve always been a storyteller and an artist in a way. I do view myself as an artist. One of the most impactful Sora pieces I made was a short film called Dominant, which was actually trying to look at 1960s Soviet Russia through the POV of my dad’s eyes. And who’s going to fund that, some short artsy film of mine? So I’ve actually been able to explore a lot of my own creativity again, when I had felt like I had transitioned more into being a businessperson than an artist. So in many ways, these tools have reawakened my artistry and gotten me feeling a lot more creative again, which is fun. But I am certainly both.

SAFIAN: No, for a lot of folks, this happens all the time in Hollywood. They refer to themselves as artists, but really, most of the time, they are running businesses, right?

KLEVEROV: Of course. I run a business. That is my day-to-day function. Yeah.

Copy LinkWhy AI-assisted creation is different from pushing a magic button

SAFIAN: In that artistic world, you talk about being AI-assisted as opposed to AI-created. That’s an important distinction for you.

KLEVEROV: We are creating the work. We wrote it, we came up with it, we storyboarded it. We are doing the story architecture. The AI is helping us get to a finished result quicker, but it’s not like we pressed a button and the thing just made itself. I think there’s been a lot of headline-chasing, and people will claim things like that, which is unfortunate because that’s not true. Most of the time, when you do see something that someone claims they made in two hours for $20, they’re usually quite talented. And long-form storytelling just requires more input.

SAFIAN: So there are a lot of folks who worry about AI’s ability to blur what’s real and what’s not, whether that’s we’ve had political attack ads already out that include things —

KLEVEROV: It’s a busy summer.

SAFIAN: Fear of deepfakes and all that kind of stuff. How do you think about all that?

KLEVEROV: This is an interesting question. I will say Sora was one of the best at making realistic people, and now it’s gone. So I am curious how that impacts all of this. But it does beg the question: How are we regulating this moving forward? And I do think this could finally be where blockchain actually makes some real-world sense. At the risk of sounding a little dystopian, like 1984 or Channel One, what if there were cameras that, as they filmed, were geo-tagged and timestamped onto a blockchain instantly? And there was some verifiable way, with a hologram or something, where when you were watching something, you knew, “Okay, I can actually just scan this thing. I’ll go to this public blockchain, and I can see this is being filmed here or there at this time.” Of course, the risk of that, too, is, hey, the only thing you can trust is what’s on Channel One in this Orwellian state. So I don’t know. There has to be a balance. It’s certainly a concern.

SAFIAN: But if you had the video of this conversation, of the two of us that’s being created right now, you could have us saying and doing almost anything with that source material.

KLEVEROV: Pretty much. Because it’s going to look really realistic, and you could have us talking about anything.

SAFIAN: And move us to a different location, and change our outfits.

KLEVEROV: Yeah, anything.

SAFIAN: Anything.

KLEVEROV: Hawaiian shirts. Whatever you want.

SAFIAN: For me, I feel like that’s a little scary. My stuff is out there. For you, you feel like that’s fun, or —

KLEVEROV: It’s fun and fine. The scamming stuff is what worries me the most. And there’s already a lot of scams, and a lot of phishing attacks and whatnot. So it’s something we have to try to control.

SAFIAN: Yeah. The video call that comes to my mom from this video is going to look like me and sound like me. So we need a safe word.

KLEVEROV: Yeah, exactly. Everyone pick your safe word.

Copy LinkWhat filmmakers should keep from the old system and reinvent for the new one

SAFIAN: Just another password for us to keep track of. Looking ahead, if you had to pick what you wanted to continue in filmmaking from the pre-AI era and what things you’d like to leave behind, do you have a sense of what that ledger looks like?

KLEVEROV: Yeah, I love shoots. I love film sets. There’s just something so special about them. I love being on the lot. I think it’s a beautiful place. At the same time, I think there are a lot of inefficiencies we can get rid of. To me, as a storyteller, if you tell me, “Okay, you’re going to have less budget, but you can go make more things,” I will take that 10 out of 10 times, because that’s where we’re at now. By the way, budgets have been coming down globally—brand work, everything—regardless of AI. We’ve been in this world, and we know every year it’s like, “Oh, we got a little less, we need a little bit more.” We’re never going to have these 1,000-person animation teams or crews ever again, but can we tell more interesting stories? And I think, for that reason, we’re going to have this renaissance of independent cinema and new, bold stories, where some exec will take a shot on something that costs maybe a few million bucks instead of 50.

SAFIAN: And the number of jobs in the business will go down or go up?

KLEVEROV: We’ve hired more people than ever before, and we are finding so much more new talent. There’s a whole new skill set that’s evolved. So I’m very optimistic about all of this, in that yes, maybe some jobs will become a little redundant or not be used as much, but there will be many new jobs and new specialties that arise.

SAFIAN: So do you have a date for when Critters is going to be completed, when we’re going to be able to see it?

KLEVEROV: Our target is six to nine months from the start of our new official production, which we’re waiting to start until we sort out our partner. Because we need to know who our partner is and how we’re delivering it to the world. But it’ll be a pretty short time frame as soon as that’s sorted.

SAFIAN: What’s at stake with AI for Hollywood, and entertainment and brands right now?

KLEVEROV: There’s a lot at stake. I think we have to make smart, calculated risks right now. You don’t want to have a cold-start problem where you’re so restrained and so safe that, a couple of years from now, when everything has clicked into place, you have no idea how to do any of this. If you don’t act now, you could get left behind in a pretty serious way. My big takeaway is, one, there’s no magic button. There are a lot of narratives that there is, but trust me, there is not. Two, we need creatives, honestly maybe more than ever before. And three, great stories and true storytellers will win.

SAFIAN: Well, Nik, this was great. Thanks.

KLEVEROV: Thank you so much, Bob.

SAFIAN: Thanks for doing it.

KLEVEROV: My pleasure. Appreciate it.

SAFIAN: Creativity is essential in making the most of AI. As Nik explains, the question isn’t whether to use the new tools, but how to deploy them with distinction. When everyone can scale their volume of output, how do we stand out? AI isn’t a magic button, as Nik says, and there are definitely risks from deepfakes and more. Where it all lands is far from clear. To me, that’s a story with plenty of drama. So whether it’s Hollywood, or advertising, or finance and supply chains, I’ll be watching the creative evolution with interest and trying to stay malleable, as Nik puts it, to be open to serendipity. As for the Critters premiere, whenever it happens, I’ll be watching for that, too, and I’ll bring the popcorn.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.