What People Really Want From AI

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:01)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, an 81,000 strong study on what people really want from AI. Before that in the headlines, Val Kilmer comes back for one last role. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Blitzi and AIUC. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai.
Two more quick things before we get out of here. First of all, thank you to everyone who has submitted to Agent Madness. We'll be putting together the bracket over the next couple of days, and that will go live next week. Secondly, as you can kind of tell from Agent Madness, along with Claw Camp and AIDB New Year and all these things, one of the things that I'm thinking a lot about this year is how to both help people figure out how to use these tools but also show off their work when they do. I'm exploring whether there's anything useful we have to contribute around actually connecting agent builders and orchestrators to the companies and partners that need them. And if you're interested in contributing some information to that exploration, go sign up for more info at aidbtalent.ai. Among other things, you might get early access to the Chucky agent portfolio that I talked about in my Agent Tournament episode. So again, that's aidbtalent.ai.
Well, as you heard in the intro, AI has brought Val Kilmer back to star in one last movie. The film is called As Deep as the Grave and features Val Kilmer in the role of Father Finton. Kilmer was cast way back in 2020 when production began. However, by the time the film was being shot several years later, Kilmer was in the final stages of his battle with throat cancer, which would ultimately take his life last year. Now he's coming back thanks to AI to actually star in the movie. What's generating a lot of discussion around this one is that, as much reflexive antagonism as it's going to get, and there is plenty of that going around, it's harder to paint this with the brush of a cynical use of technology to replace human actors. Instead, in this case, at least according to the people making the film, it's AI being used to deliver on their original vision. The character Father Finton is a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist who played a key role in the true story being depicted. The film's writer and director Querte Vorhez said, He was the actor I wanted to play this role. It was very much designed around him. It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the Southwest. I was looking at a call sheet the other day and we had him ready to shoot. He was just going through a really, really tough time medically and he couldn't do it. Now Kilmer ended up not being able to shoot a single scene for the movie, so the entire performance was generated using AI tools. Vorhez created the performance with full permission from Kilmer's estate and the cooperation and support of his children. Said Vorhez, his family kept saying how important they thought this movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this. He really thought it was an important story that he wanted his name on. It was that support that gave me the confidence to say, okay, let's do this. Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted. The film was shot on Navajo land in Arizona and New Mexico and tells the story of archaeologist Anne and Earl Morris working with the local people in the 1920s to uncover the ancient history of the Anasazi people. Kilmer has Cherokee ancestry and made his home in northern New Mexico, so the story about discovering one of the earliest civilizations in the southwest had a personal importance for him. While AI was used to create the on-screen performance, the film uses Kilmer's actual voice which was damaged by tracheal surgery in 2015 That worked for the real-world figure of Father Fenton who suffered from tuberculosis. At one stage during the movie's production, Voorhees produced a cut that simply omitted Kilmer's character, but later realized the character was critical to round out the narrative. Voorhees said, We really figured out that this is a major missing element. Normally we would just recast an actor. I'm all about working with our actors, and we have brilliant performances all throughout this movie. But we can't roll camera again. We don't have the budget, we're not a big studio film. So we had to think of innovative ways to do it, and we realized the technology is there for us. Voorhees followed all SAG guidelines on the use of AI and compensated the Kilmer estate for his appearance. He says he hopes the film can be a model of the ethical use of AI in filmmaking. Now this was not Kilmer's first rodeo with AI. He previously supported the use of AI to recreate his voice for his reprisal of the Iceman character in Top Gun Maverick, which was the last time he appeared on screen. He said at the time that he was grateful to the company who produced the effect, commenting, As human beings, the ability to communicate is the core of our existence, and the side effects from throat cancer have made it difficult for others to understand me. The chance to narrate my story in a voice that feels authentic and familiar is an incredibly special gift. Said Kilmer's daughter Mercedes about the new film, he always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling. The spirit is something which we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part. Now, it's not worth going through, like I said, the reflexively negative comments. Sitting at five and a half million views on Twitter, the variety story is much more viral than anything they've produced for some time. One of the more nuanced versions of the critique came from Raymond Arroyo, who wrote, This digital necromancy is a very bad idea. First of all, what makes a great actor is their unexpected inspired choices in a given role, a glance, a grimace, an extended phrase. The AI Val Kilmer will be denied all of those uniquely human and very personal choices. It will be an extended facsimile of an actor without his fire or ingenuity, a hollow show. In addition to which, the deceased to Kilmer will be saddled with a performance and a role he has no agency over. This is a violation of his dignity and his work as a living artist. Now on the second part, we don't really have any other way as society to respect the wishes of the dead unless they made those wishes explicitly known, or in the absence of that, we rely on their family, and given that his family is very clearly on board, I'm not sure what to say about that second one. On the first one, I think there is much more truth there, but if it is true, we'll see that in practice and I think the market will vote with their feet. In any case, like I said, this one is sure to be very controversial, and it'll be interesting to see how the discussion shakes out. Moving back to the core of the AI industry, it's Microsoft's turn to shake up their AI organization with the restructure of their Copilot teams. Microsoft is making several big changes to make their AI efforts more coherent. The team working on the consumer and commercial versions of Copilot will be combined, allowing the products to be brought more in line with one another. Customer surveys from earlier in the year showed the multiple different versions of Copilot were a major source of confusion. This combined Copilot team will be led by product experience executive Jacob Andru, who has been promoted to a new role as EVP of Copilot. Andru will now report directly to CEO Satya Nadella, rather than AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, giving Nadella more direct oversight of Copilot. With responsibility for Copilot removed, Suleyman will now focus on leading Microsoft's proprietary model training and super intelligence efforts. There has been very little progress made on this front over the past year, with Microsoft last releasing a foundation model in August. Nadella's announcement makes it seem as though this move is about building out additional leadership for each aspect of Microsoft's AI efforts. He wrote, We are bringing the Copilot system across commercial and consumer together as one unified effort. This will span four connected pillars. Copilot experience, Copilot platform, Microsoft 365 apps and AI models. This is how we move from a collection of great products to a truly integrated system, one that is simpler and more powerful for customers. Now, in his own note, Suleiman said that removing Copilot from his portfolio was designed to, Enable me to focus all my energy on our super intelligence efforts and be able to deliver world-class models for Microsoft over the next five years. Suleiman seems to believe this is the big future bet for Microsoft, telling CNBC, I'm genuinely thrilled about this change precisely because most of the future value is going to accrue to the model layer and my job is to create highly cogs optimized highly efficient enterprise specific model lineages for Microsoft over the next three to five years. That is singularly the objective precisely because the model is the product, right? That is the future direction of all the IP. Now, there are a few big takeaways from the shakeup. Primarily it resolves the issue that Copilot didn't have a single owner within Microsoft. The product was nominally under Suleiman's leadership, but in practice it seemed like a fragmented effort implemented across multiple product teams. The move also reinforces that AI is a critical business unit at Microsoft that requires more resources and a more structured approach. Veteran Microsoft reporter and senior editor at The Verge, Tom Warren, commented, It's hard not to also read this as an admission that Microsoft's efforts to separate the Copilot experience for consumers and businesses has failed over the past couple of years. Now, to be fair to Microsoft, they are certainly not alone in taking a few iterations to get their AI organization right. Google undertook a major restructuring in late 2024 to set themselves up for a massive comeback the following year. Meta has been constantly reshuffling their teams over the past year in order to get their efforts back on track. And more recently, Alibaba has also restructured their AI teams to focus on product and business. And that's not even counting OpenAI's new focus and removal of side quests. Given how many users are basically forced to use Copilot by virtue of their company's policies, I hope nothing more that this leads to great things. Lastly today, just one day after launching Cowork Dispatch, Anthropic is updating the tool to add support for Claude Code sessions. Cowork Dispatch is Anthropic's tool for kicking off and monitoring Cowork tasks from a mobile device. Claude Code has its own separate equivalent known as Remote Control. But as of today, the line between Cowork and Claude Code is getting a lot more blurry. Announcing the new feature, Anthropic's Felix Riesberg posted, By popular demand, Dispatch can now launch Claude Code sessions, ask it to build, make or improve something. One user asked Riesberg if this feature is a replacement of Remote Control for Claude Code, to which he responded, We have some things in the works to make Remote Control overall a smoother experience, but this is using the same underlying primitives as Claude Code's Remote Control. I think the question will be, how much over the next call it year, Anthropic synchronizes the experience of Cowork and Claude Code? Do they become one suite? Do they remain separate but have pretty clear feature parity, with just different interfaces? There is an argument that Claude Cowork, as Claude Code for all the other types of knowledge workers, might be the most important product line of their immediate future. For now though, that is going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode.