Humans Out of the Loop

Tilly Norwood smiles on cue. Her teeth never blur now, her eyes never twitch. She delivers her lines with algorithmic conviction. Every gesture a statistic, every glance a probability. She is the world’s first AI actress, and she’s already the industry’s favorite employee.

When Maureen Dowd wrote “When A.I. Came for Hollywood”, she quoted Jaron Lanier warning that if we build a world run by simulations, people “grow alienated, nervous, unsure of their own value.” He was right. We’re not just building better effects; we’re writing ourselves out of the picture. The dream factories of Los Angeles are becoming automated content mills , machines trained on our emotions, spitting them back in focus-grouped loops until even nostalgia feels synthetic.

Hollywood has always chased efficiency, faster shoots, cheaper labor, bigger margins. But now the logic is total. AI writes, directs, casts, edits. Human unpredictability is the last remaining inefficiency. A studio exec recently bragged that his digital actress “won’t talk back.” That’s not just management speak; that’s the sound of a culture being domesticated.

The result is content that feels like content. Perfectly watchable. Perfectly empty. A slop machine designed to trigger recognition, not reflection. We are barreling toward a Ready Player One existence where reality becomes the outdated medium, where the only stories left are those we let the system tell us about ourselves.

And it isn’t just film. OpenAI’s quiet move to allow “adult conversations” on verified accounts signals the next phase of simulation: AI that not only entertains but replaces intimacy itself. We are building mirrors that flirt back. At first it feels harmless, consensual fantasy, digital companionship, but each iteration removes friction, the one thing that made human connection worth anything at all.

The feedback loop that once defined art—the exchange between maker and audience, is breaking. We no longer teach the machine what we feel; the machine trains us in how to feel. Our capacity for patience, empathy, even boredom, is being optimized out of existence.

Maybe that’s the future: a culture without pulse, polished and efficient, where nothing interrupts the feed. Or maybe this is the moment we notice the silence, step back from the loop, and remember that imperfection, our glitches, our delays, our hesitations, is what made the story human in the first place.