AI is quietly and profoundly reshaping everyday life, from our cinema screens to the architecture of global finance. The upcoming western As Deep As the Grave offers a striking illustration of this shift: Val Kilmer, who died in 2025, will appear in the film for about an hour thanks to an authorised AI visual deepfake, built with the blessing of his estate and daughter Mercedes, who noted that her father “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling”.
His example is far from isolated; actors from Bruce Willis to Matthew McConaughey have, according to the Guardian, now licensed their digital likenesses, and celebrities like Paris Hilton are striking deals wto deploy AI versions of themselves across social platforms. Yet as AI’s creative possibilities dazzle, its systemic power is simultaneously alarming the world’s top financial regulators. At the IMF and World Bank spring meetings in Washington, finance ministers and central bank governors, including Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and ECB President Christine Lagarde, have been urgently debating Anthropic’s new Mythos model, warning that its advanced capabilities could pose severe risks to the resilience of the global financial system if misused. “It reminds us how fast the AI world moves,” Bailey cautioned, capturing the sentiment felt across both Hollywood and the halls of global economic power: AI is not a future problem to be solved, it is a present reality to be navigated.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/apr/16/first-trailer-released-for-ai-val-kilmer-western