Tomorrow Tuesday — October 2026 (Issue #11)
The deal of the century in Hollywood just closed. The new company born from the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. is called Skynet Skydance.
Welcome to another issue of Tomorrow Tuesday, where we cover the revolution running through film, video games, music and the creative industries.
A newsletter by SOUTS, where we explore what happens when artificial intelligence stops being just a tool and starts changing the way we create and consume stories.
A new stage in the AI image race has begun
Three image generation models dropped this week: FLUX 3, Ideogram 4.5 and Nano Banana 2.1. Low-key as they are, these models make it official: a new stage for this family of models is here.
All three came out with the same pitch: you can ask them to edit specific things in an image and every other pixel stays untouched.
At SOUTS we tried all three and my personal ranking is FLUX > Ideogram > Nano Banana, but at this point the models are very similar.
It’s honestly surprising how much better these models keep getting at understanding the prompt you give them, and how nothing outside the section you want to edit actually gets touched.
FLUX in particular has something I loved: you don’t just pass it a prompt, you can also pass it the location of a box inside the image, which is where you want that prompt to edit. You can even pass a reference image for each little box you mark.
What happened these past months is that the quality metric in image generation tells us very little now. Every model is already so good at generating an image that looks realistic that the gains are tiny and keep shrinking. The next frontier is this increasingly precise editing.
OpenAI announced Dots: it works without you knowing
OpenAI had its not-so-interesting DevDay. Among the best things they presented is Dots: agents with a computer in the cloud that can work without you asking them to.
The idea is that you give them permission to access different tools, for example Slack, email, your calendar, Notion and so on.
Your Dot gets ahead on work it knows you have to do. For example, if it knows you have to send an email, it can start writing you a draft without you asking for it.
For what was supposed to be OpenAI’s big announcement, I find it a bit underwhelming. I’ve been trying it for a week and it hasn’t solved a single even moderately important problem for me, but it’s not bad either.
That said, it’s a bit aggressive in how it invades your privacy. For example, I’ve been in a Slack conversation about which image to send to the press and, while I’m still talking, a Dots notification shows up saying: “I’d go with the one where you’re smiling.”
Part of me wonders whether the goal of all these tools is to slowly get us to lower our guard and give AI systems more and more access to places we used to consider private.
What if you don’t own your movie’s IP?
In the infinite world that is the internet there’s a community called SCP Foundation.
Thousands of people build stories about an organization dedicated to containing anomalous phenomena. They invent monsters, objects and strange situations, and document them as if that organization really existed.
Neon just announced a horror anthology for 2027 based on SCP Foundation.
The announcement comes with a particular commitment: distributing the film and related materials under Creative Commons CC BY-SA.
What does that mean? That anyone can adapt and commercially exploit these works, with attribution and sharing their adaptations under the terms of the license.
In other words, Neon is going to make a movie that any fan will be able to adapt, change and tinker with however they like.
It’s brilliant. Imagine if we could all make our own Harry Potter episodes. Fan creation is only going to grow.
Studios still have a big edge in this model, above all in their access to capital and talent.
To remember why we do this
I recommend this tweet by Jeffrey Katzenberg. It goes over the revolutions film has already been through, with everything that was gained and lost along the way, and helps put what we’re living through with AI into perspective.
Between so many model launches, it’s good to remember what got us here: the urge to tell stories that make people laugh, cry and believe in a character. A read to get a bit of inspiration back.
That was Tomorrow Tuesday, the weekly newsletter. If you want to subscribe, subscribe!
At SOUTSwe try to always stay on top of what’s happening, and every time there’s something relevant we’ll bring it to you in this newsletter.
See you next Tomorrow Tuesday.
Yves
