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Suddenly the internet discovers AI actresses and people react as if civilisation just fell off a cliff. “This is the end of cinema,” “Art is dead,” the usual dramatic noise. Strange, isn’t it? When the music industry rolled out AI pop stars, nobody had a nervous breakdown. No riots, no ethical uproar, barely a raised eyebrow. But the moment AI enters acting, panic. Hysteria. Think pieces in every direction. That shift in reaction says a lot. It isn’t really about technology, and it certainly isn’t about protecting art. It is about what people are suddenly forced to see.

Mainstream pop was industrialised long before AI showed up. It stopped being a space of expression and became a machine that spits out content on schedule. Everything is formatted: safe melodies, predictable structures, interchangeable performmers. No friction, no risk, no struggle. Just output. So when an AI singer appears, it doesn’t shock anyone. She fits perfectly inside a system that already replaced creativity with optimisation. People barely notice because she doesn’t change anything. She simply exposes the truth of what pop had already become.

But an AI actress? That’s a different storm. That cuts straight into the politics of the body. This isn’t about innovation, it’s about control. A synthetic actress doesn’t age. She doesn’t negotiate. She doesn’t ask for fair pay or safe working conditions. She doesn’t say no. She has no boundaries, no agency, no union, no rights. And that isn’t a coincidence. It is the perfect fantasy for an industry that has always tried to own women’s images while discarding their humanity. AI doesn’t invent that violence. It perfects it.

So no, the scandal isn’t AI. The scandal is that AI makes the exploitation impossible to ignore. What people call “disruption” is just continuity. Hollywood has always extracted profit from actresses while erasing their autonomy. Now it has found a way to erase the body entirely. With AI, studios no longer even need to tolerate the existence of the worker behind the performance. They can just extract the image and automate the rest.

What really unsettles people isn’t the so-called “death of art” (that is to say; the erasure of yet another form of human language), it’s the disappearance of the body as resistance. A living body can refuse. A body can withdraw labour. A body can age, break, bleed, survive. It is the last thing capital cannot fully control. So of course they’re trying to get rid of it. The AI actress isn’t progress. It’s a political project. And its purpose is simple: culture without people, creation without creators, images without life.