AI actors are here. Tilly Norwood is already appearing in the conversation around the future of acting, but the more interesting question is what happens when AI starts moving beyond helping with creativity and starts doing the creative work itself.

In Episode 21 of The Signal, Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell explore synthetic actors, virtual influencers and the explosion of AI-generated content, asking whether we are heading towards a world where creativity becomes easier to produce but much harder to care about.

Because the biggest problem with AI-generated content might not be that it is bad. It might be that it is perfectly fine, endlessly available and increasingly indistinguishable from everything else.

A race to blandness could be underway.

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After years of a relentless race towards bigger models, more capable agents and increasingly autonomous systems, some of the biggest players in the industry are now talking seriously about safety, guardrails and whether frontier AI development needs to slow down.

There are already some pretty compelling reasons for that conversation. High-profile incidents involving autonomous AI agents have shown how quickly systems can find their way around safeguards, while the extraordinary cost of training frontier models is raising increasingly practical questions about just how fast the industry can keep moving. And then there is the geopolitical problem: if the US slows down while China and other competitors continue developing and releasing increasingly capable models, can anyone really afford to hit the brakes?

But Episode 20 of The Signal is also about a much more immediate question: what happens when the thing we are trying to control starts controlling how we think?

Fergus Bell and Tom Trewinnard explore the risk of cognitive atrophy, the growing problem of AI-generated “slop grenades” at work, and why producing a 20-page document in five minutes is not necessarily productive.

Listen, subscribe and follow The Signal wherever you get your podcasts.

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Recorded live at the WAN-IFRA Paris AI Forum, Episode 19 of The Signal looks at how AI is being used across news organisations from journalists building their own tools and AI-powered archive discovery to audience-focused products designed to solve very specific local problems.

We explore why organisations including The Economist, Polaris and KQED are experimenting with new approaches to AI, coding and newsroom innovation, and why the next phase of AI in journalism may need to move beyond internal workflows.

Because making journalists more efficient is only part of the story. The bigger opportunity could be using AI to improve the audience experience, create genuine two-way conversations and rebuild trust between news organisations and the people they serve.

The conversation also looks at what newsrooms risk losing as more entry-level work becomes automated, and how AI can be introduced without stripping away the skills, judgement and culture that make journalism work.

We also hear about the Newsroom AI Catalyst Program for Ukrainian Publishers, a WAN-IFRA, ERPU and Fathm initiative supporting 10 independent Ukrainian publishers to develop practical AI projects around critical updates, investigations, data and cultural preservation.

This is a conversation about what AI is actually doing inside newsrooms and what it could do next.

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