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.

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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 were 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.A.I. 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 Fintin.

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 Fenton, 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 Vorhe, 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. Vorhe's created the performance with full permission from Kilmer's estate and the cooperation in support of his children. Said Vorhays, 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 archaeologists 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. 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, Vorhe's produced a cut that simply omitted Kilmer's character, but later realized the character was critical to round out the narrative. Vorhe 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. Borges 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 and 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

...