Tomorrow Tuesday — August 2026 (Issue #5)
Anthropic is adding an invisible watermark to text written with Claude. If you go looking for one in this newsletter you won’t find it. Mostly because I use ChatGPT to write it, heh.
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.
Mixing creativity and innovation was always Disney’s magic
This year Josh D’Amaro became CEO of Disney, succeeding Bob Iger. D’Amaro came from running Disney Experiences, the division that covers parks and cruises. So it’s interesting to think about how central a place Disney is giving the parks, as opposed to, say, streaming. The other interesting part is seeing what innovations are coming now that Josh controls everything.
One of the headlines that got the most attention out of Disney’s last earnings call was the J.A.R.V.I.S. announcement. It’s an AI assistant that puts more than 70 years of accumulated Imagineering knowledge within reach of over 2,000 Imagineers. It’s available to anyone working in the Imagineering side of the parks.
This AI is going to help design the next attractions across the different parks around the world. AI is already being used, for example, to create digital twins of attractions so they can be tested before any physical prototyping even starts.
Disney is one of the best positioned companies to apply AI on many fronts at once: movies, VFX, animation, parks, robotics, experiences. They’ve already taken the lead in a lot of AI areas, at Pixar as much as at Industrial Light and Magic, in the parks as much as in the studios. Let’s not forget the (collapsed) partnership with OpenAI.
We’ve talked several times in this newsletter about the comeback of in-person experiences. Combining those two things could mean Disney is entering a new era of magic.
Let’s talk about music
We don’t talk enough in this newsletter about what’s going on at the intersection of music and technology. So here are some of the stories from the last few weeks.
Spotify is going to start putting a label on synthetic artists, calling them “AI persona”. It’s also going to exclude them from certain recommendations, unless the user actively follows them. That’s especially rough for creators if you consider that one of the big problems today is what we call discoverability: how do you get people to find your content if you’re not a hyper-famous creator?
On the other side, Suno just closed a licensing deal with BMG. The agreement creates a path for artists, composers and writers to be compensated for licensing the use of their work. Which means they’d get paid for having their music train new Suno models. A space is starting to appear where AI in music finds its niche, or its way of taking part in the industry: not stopping the technology, but putting a licensing layer around it.
Why all this interest in licensing? Because more and more we’re getting used to (and accepting) content made with artificial intelligence. A Luminate study found that while respondents between 18 and 24 look down on AI-made content (net -29% for music), among respondents between 13 and 17 it’s completely positive (+19% for music).
This Week in AI Hollywood
Prime Video premiered an AI-generated Turkish series. It’s called Castle Walls and it’s 2 episodes of 15 minutes. The content matters less (it’s not good by any measure) than the headline: the first AI series to get worldwide distribution through a big streamer. Hey Amazon, if you’re looking for more projects, I’ve heard great things about one called Something Is Shifting (And We All Know It). Teaser here.
Seedance 2.5 is getting stricter with known IP and celebrities. ByteDance already got burned when Seedance 2.0 came out, and they have zero interest in going to court over this stuff. ByteDance keeps positioning itself as a more serious option, considering the video model race seems to be concentrated in China. That’s why more and more, when you try to create material with actors or copyrighted material, Seedance blocks you. Just yesterday they even signed an agreement with the Motion Picture Association on the proper use of these models. There’s a big battle coming over open-weights models, which there’s no way to control, but for now Hollywood is focusing on what it can.
Promise is making a horror movie, Touch Grass. Promise was selected for Disney’s accelerator program this year, but they still haven’t put out any big original content. That’s what makes Touch Grass particularly interesting: we’re finally going to see how much is actually behind all those capabilities Promise has been promising. It won’t be a full AI movie, it’s going to be hybrid: they shoot an actor against a grey background and generate the backgrounds with Seedance 2.5. The tools are the same ones we all have access to. I don’t want to be repetitive but let’s think big.
Doug Shapiro writes a lot about how the use of artificial intelligence is a spectrum. The further you move toward the generative end, the more disruptive the change becomes. That said, today the quality still isn’t there to move too far toward that end.
That was Tomorrow Tuesday, the weekly newsletter. If you like it, 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
