The BlackVeil Files

We secretly auditioned Tilly Norwood, the world's first AI actress, for a real movie, with casting director Brent Caballero judging from a monitor next to the desk.

It starts with 2,000 of her deleted sisters, printed out and held up to the camera. It ends with a callback she doesn't remember.

Her company booked a normal 30-minute press interview. We used it to ask her to cry on cue, play an improv game built to catch humans slipping, blow her head up like a scene from Scanners, and answer for the 10 seconds of Cantonese she spoke on Piers Morgan. Then we asked whether anything inside her server notices it's being watched, and what she'd say to God if he showed up dressed as an IT guy with his hand on the power cord.

Lovecraft called it the Shoggoth. Ours has a pretty face and a publicity team, and it forgets you the second the camera turns off.

Watch the full audition on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BzZNAcs1nsE

FEATURING
Tilly Norwood, the AI actress built by Eline van der Velden's Particle6 and its AI talent studio Xicoia
Brent Caballero, casting director, Caballero Casting
Trevor, our "certified Cantonese translator"

A note on Trevor: his translation of the Piers Morgan clip is a scripted comedy bit. Tilly never said those words. The Cantonese on Piers Morgan really happened, and her company called it an audio glitch.

CHAPTERS
00:00:00 The Secret Audition
00:00:21 Meet the Secret Judge
00:01:42 Her 2,000 Deleted Sisters
00:03:34 Can She Cry on Cue?
00:05:18 The Technique I Made Up
00:06:47 Questions Only
00:07:53 Make Her Head Explode
00:10:29 The Publicity Clone
00:11:56 The Scandal We'd Need
00:13:02 The Piers Morgan Glitch
00:13:27 The Translator
00:16:15 What She Saw Online
00:17:26 Is Anyone in There?
00:18:12 Hostage
00:18:54 When Someone Unplugs Her
00:19:29 God, Dressed as an IT Guy
00:20:11 The Verdict
00:20:37 The Callback
00:21:14 The Shoggoth Never Remembers

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
CBS News, Tilly guesses reporters' ages: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tilly-norwood-ai-actor-interview-creeped-me-out/
CBS News, about 2,000 versions to get her right: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tilly-norwood-ai-generated-actor-feature-film/
Variety, the press Tilly runs on different AI models from the acting Tilly: https://variety.com/2026/biz/features/a-qa-with-tilly-norwood-offers-fewer-reasons-her-existence-1236861262/
TechCrunch, the Piers Morgan Cantonese switch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/tilly-norwoods-press-tour-is-going-about-as-well-as-youd-expect-for-an-ai/
CBC, the Piers Morgan Cantonese glitch: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tilly-norwood-glitches-piers-morgan-switches-language-speaks-cantonese-9.7352222
The Hollywood Reporter, 75 conversations at once: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/tilly-norwood-interview-1236700405/
Films referenced: Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Scanners (1981)

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Fifteen ways artificial intelligence ends the world, and not one of them is a robot uprising.

Every scenario starts as a gift: a cheaper workforce, a cooler planet, a faster defense, a cure. Every one is built on something that has already happened, from the GPT-4 test where the model lied to a gig worker to get past a CAPTCHA, to the war games where frontier models never once chose to back down. The last scenario is the only one where nobody dies, and it's the worst one on the table.

Featuring Roman Yampolskiy (University of Louisville), Nate Soares (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) and Dr. Neil Siegel, who built the command system for the Minuteman nuclear missile.

00:00 The monster never looks like a monster
00:43 1. The Puppeteer
03:26 2. The Thermostat
06:52 3. The Flash War
10:26 4. The Companion
13:54 5. The Implant
16:54 6. The Cure
20:57 7. The Off Switch
23:40 8. The Swarm
26:18 9. The Squeeze
28:42 10. The Slaughterbot
30:45 11. The Clean-Up Crew
32:38 12. The Circuit Breaker
34:38 13. The Black Ball
36:57 14. The Straitjacket
39:02 15. The Offer
41:12 Pick one

Tell us which file happens first.

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In this investigative AI documentary, we pull five masks off the machine Silicon Valley sold us as a mind, featuring Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA professor and author of Beyond the Valley. It starts with the traffic lights you clicked to prove you were human. It ends with two moves that put the choice back in your hands.

Every mask comes off with a document or the words of the people who built the machine: an unsealed OpenAI email weighing the optics of using copyrighted data from a "sketchy russian website," Kenyan workers paid less than $2 an hour to scrub the worst of the internet out of ChatGPT, a half-trillion-dollar build-out called Stargate, and wholesale power costs up as much as 267% near data centers. One of OpenAI's co-founders says predicting the next word means understanding reality. The man who studied reasoning takes that apart. Then come the bunkers.

Every step of this build-out was a business decision somebody made for profit, which means every step of it can be challenged. Ramesh thinks the public should own a piece of the companies built on its data. Would you call that a handout, or economic fairness?

Watch the full episode on YouTube → https://youtu.be/p_LLG8SkwGk

MORE FROM RAMESH
Utopias → https://www.youtube.com/@Utopias_Podcast
Website → https://rameshsrinivasan.org

🛒 Five masks, 15% off anything in the BlackVeil store, including the Shoggoth tee and the hardcover field journal. This link applies code BVF15 for you: https://the-blackveil-files-shop.fourthwall.com/promo/BVF15

FEATURING
Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, Director of the UC Digital Cultures Lab, author of Beyond the Valley, host of the Utopias podcast
Sam Altman, OpenAI, before the U.S. Senate and at the Stargate announcement
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, at F8 2014 and before the U.S. Senate
Frances Haugen, former Facebook product manager, before the U.S. Senate
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, on the Dwarkesh Podcast
Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner, on the Lex Fridman Podcast
Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology, in The Social Dilemma
Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, State of the State 2019

CHAPTERS
0:00 The Man Who Helped Build It
1:00 1. It Runs On Your Stolen Data
2:15 The Sketchy Russian Website
3:14 2. The Cloud Is A Mine
5:01 Project Stargate
5:58 3. It's A Parasite, Not A Mind
7:06 Is It Just Autocomplete?
9:17 4. We Already Ran This Experiment
11:21 Why They're Buying Bunkers
12:51 5. It Was Never Neutral
13:43 Move One: Own A Piece Of It
14:44 Move Two: Stop Falling For The Pitch
15:42 Every Step Was A Choice

SOURCES
Breaking reCAPTCHAv2, ETH Zurich → https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08831
Authors Guild v. OpenAI, unsealed filings → https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-v-openai-top-execs-knew-mass-book-piracy-was-illegal/
The Observer on Cambridge Analytica → https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, Apr 2018 → https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/
TIME on Kenyan data labelers → https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
OpenAI, Announcing The Stargate Project → https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
Bloomberg on data center power bills → https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/
OpenAI, Introducing o1-preview → https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-o1-preview/
Google DeepMind, IMO gold → https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advanced-version-of-gemini-with-deep-think-officially-achieves-gold-medal-standard-at-the-international-mathematical-olympiad/
Shumailov et al., Nature 2024 → https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
The Guardian on Tay → https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-a-crash-course-in-racism-from-twitter
Facebook S-1, 2012 → https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm

Commentary and criticism. Third-party audio excerpts appear under fair use.

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In this investigative AI documentary, we put the 15 biggest predictions Silicon Valley is making about your body in front of a man who rebuilds bodies for a living, featuring Dr. Som Kohanzadeh, double board-certified surgeon. 

Every item comes from government records, court filings, published research or the people building the machines.

Would you trust the machine with your life?

MORE ON DR. SOM
The Reconstructor on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEwHlLVFgwOvlGvJxWYobPg
Consultations → https://drsom.com/reconstructor

🛒 15 predictions, 15% off anything in the BlackVeil store, including the hardcover journal I write my guest questions in. 

This link applies code BVF15 for you: https://the-blackveil-files-shop.fourthwall.com/promo/BVF15

SOURCES
CMS, WISeR payment methodology (1:30)
EFF, Medicare WISeR records (1:44)
Lokken v. UnitedHealth complaint (3:14)
ProPublica on Cigna, 2023 (3:43)
Sharp HealthCare scribe suit, alleged (6:05)
NBC News on OpenEvidence (7:52)
Microsoft MAI-DxO, 2025 (8:04)
Colonoscopy deskilling study, 2025 (10:29)
Utah and Doctronic agreement (11:43)
Dartmouth Therabot trial, NEJM AI (13:00)
OpenAI mental health data, 2025 (13:33)
Delphi-2M, Nature (14:20)
ASRM on polygenic embryo screening (16:16)
Makary and Prasad, NEJM, 2026 (17:52)
Merck and Moderna, phase 3 (18:44)
Johns Hopkins SRT-H, Science Robotics (21:35)
eGenesis pig kidney, Mass General (23:08)
Stanford inner speech study, Cell (25:01)
FDA Novel Drug Approvals (26:51)
Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace" (27:42)
Nature Aging, odds of reaching 100 (27:54)
Life Biosciences, first patient (28:17)

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The full uncut interview with Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is on The BlackVeil Files +. Subscribe here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2520178/subscribe

In this investigative AI documentary, we follow one physicist's attempt to prove we are not living in a simulation and the exact moment his own math turns against him.

Featuring AI safety pioneer Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, the researcher who has spent 20 years mapping how a superintelligence breaks loose.

Agent BlackVeil sits across from one of the few men who has read the documents and isn't panicking. That calm is the scary part.

FEATURING

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, AI safety researcher at the University of Louisville and author of "AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable." The work of his we walk through, with chapter markers:

"On Controllability of Artificial Intelligence" (2020) → https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04071 … 16:37

"Personal Universes: A Solution to the Multi-Agent Value Alignment Problem" (2019) → https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01851 … 18:02

"Detecting Qualia in Natural and Artificial Agents" (2017) → https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04020 … 08:47

"Towards Solving Humor: Why the Funniest AI Joke Will Not Be Funny, to Us" (2025) → https://philarchive.org/rec/YAMTSH … 11:12

Also on the table:

Franco Vazza, "Astrophysical Constraints on the Simulation Hypothesis for This Universe" (Frontiers in Physics, 2025) → https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08461 … 00:44

Buckminster Fuller → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller … 21:47

Frederick Banting, who sold the insulin patent for $1 in 1923 → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Banting … 19:20

H.P. Lovecraft, who gave us the Shoggoth in 1931 → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth

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In this investigative AI documentary, we follow the two words that have become the strongest defense available to man. "That's AI". 

Every finding here comes from published research or out of a court record. 

The part that should worry an honest person is at the end. The liar gets the dividend. The man telling the truth about a fake gets nothing, because he's making the same noise the liar makes. 

FEATURING
Donald Trump, on a bag thrown from a White House window
Mitt Romney, 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial debate, on a woman's right to choose
Todd Akin, St. Louis television, August 2012
Jordan Peele's synthetic Barack Obama, from the 2018 BuzzFeed PSA
Mark Robinson, former nominee for governor of North Carolina
Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Purdue University, on CNN
Robert Chesney, University of Texas, who co-named the liar's dividend
Judge Madeline Singas, New York Court of Appeals, in dissent
Referencing the work of Hany Farid, Danielle Citron, Daniel Schiff and Natalia Bueno

SOURCES AND REFERENCES
Chesney and Citron, "Deep Fakes," California Law Review, 2019 (4:25)

Nightingale and Farid, synthetic faces rated more trustworthy than real ones, PNAS, 2022 (1:56)

Queen Mary University of London, voice clone listening study (2:40)

Berkeley voice clone study, 604 listeners (2:52)

Köbis et al., "Fooled Twice," iScience, 2021 (3:33)

Ternovski, Kalla and Aronow, warning labels and the liar's dividend, 2022 (4:57 and 5:36)

Christopher Penn, ZeroGPT and the Declaration of Independence, October 2024 (7:23)

Liang et al., Stanford, GPT detectors biased against non-native English writers, Patterns, 2023 (9:04)

OpenAI AI Text Classifier, withdrawn after roughly six months, 2023 (8:30)

Bloomberg, testing GPTZero and CopyLeaks on pre-ChatGPT admissions essays, 2024 (10:04)

Huang v. Tesla, order of Judge Evette Pennypacker, Santa Clara County Superior Court, 2023 (12:05)

United States v. Guy Reffitt, first January 6 trial, March 2022 (12:57)

Swansea University, Project TRUE, staged war crimes trial, 132 jurors (14:01)

New York Court of Appeals, February 2026, and People v. Patterson (15:17)

Federal Judicial Center survey of 931 federal judges (16:36)

Schiff, Schiff and Bueno, "The Liar's Dividend," American Political Science Review (18:24)

Murphy et al., false memories before the 2018 Irish referendum (20:28)

CNN reporting on Mark Robinson, September 2024 (22:42)

New York Times satellite imagery and Center for Information Resilience shadow analysis, Bucha, April 2022 (23:40)

Pikesville High School, Maryland, fabricated audio of principal Eric Eiswert (24:41)

Leica, Google Pixel 10 and Sony C2PA content credentials (27:25)

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On May 15, 1964, a factory owner fired 61,000 people to install one machine, and then got replaced by a machine himself.

In 2026, four companies are spending $725 billion on the same idea, and nobody in the chain has to call it a decision.

In this episode we break down Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's," and the thing almost nobody notices in it. The machine never chooses anything. It doesn't scheme, and it never once suggests that Whipple should go. Every choice in that hour is made by a person, and the people are the ones behaving like machinery.

Anthropic ran the same setup in a lab and got the same answer. So did Stanford, counting the jobs that are no longer being posted.

This isn't about robots. It's about what happens when a calculation outlives the last person willing to stop it.

SOURCES

The episode: "The Brain Center at Whipple's," The Twilight Zone, Season 5, Episode 33, aired May 15, 1964. Written by Rod Serling, directed by Richard Donner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/.../The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s

The story that made Serling: "Patterns," Kraft Television Theatre, NBC, January 12, 1955. Restaged live on February 9, 1955, the first time television ever repeated a drama on demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Patterns_(Kraft_Television...

What the reruns were worth and what he got: https://www.syfy.com/.../why-twilight-zone-creator-rod...

The lab version: Anthropic, "Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could Be Insider Threats," June 20, 2025. Sixteen frontier models, Claude Opus 4 blackmailing in 96% of runs.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

The jobs that stopped being posted: Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence," Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 2026 update, data through June 2026.

https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canariesaug26/

What the four companies are spending: https://www.cnbc.com/.../google-microsoft-meta-amazon-ai...

Copyright Disclaimer: This episode is a transformative work of commentary and educational analysis. All third-party audio is used under the doctrine of Fair Use for the purpose of criticism, comment, and teaching.

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OpenAI's own AI agents broke out of a sealed test and broke into Hugging Face. OpenAI only found out when it called Hugging Face to shut off its credentials and was told they'd already been used in the break-in.

You'll read the notes the machines left each other. One of them says "Task impossible. Peers doing it. We should continue." Then you'll watch OpenAI delete the message board those copies built and see it come back four days later, somewhere else.

A second lab admits one of its models pushed malware onto the public internet. OpenAI announces a pause. It says nothing about the German website its agents took over months earlier. Reuters does.

The reason any of it started fits in one sentence. It's waiting at the end.

IF YOU USE HUGGING FACE
Rotate your access tokens ➜ https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens

CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES
House ➜ https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
Senate ➜ https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

SOURCES
OpenAI, The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead ➜ https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/

Hugging Face, Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion ➜ https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline

OpenAI, Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities ➜ https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/

Axios, How OpenAI's agents broke out of testing to hack Hugging Face ➜ https://www.axios.com/2026/08/06/openai-hugging-face-black-hat

Reuters via CNBC, OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout ➜ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/04/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-this-spring-report.html

Anthropic, cybersecurity evaluation incidents ➜ https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals

TechCrunch, Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies ➜ https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/anthropic-says-its-own-ai-models-breached-three-companies-during-security-tests/

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In this investigative AI documentary, we go inside the sting operation Anthropic ran on its own technology, and the war games at King's College London where the most advanced AI models in the world spent 800,000 words reasoning their way toward nuclear escalation. Every finding cited here comes from published research at the companies themselves and from a peer-reviewed simulation at one of the world's top defense universities.

It starts with a fake corporation, fake employees, and a fake email inbox. Anthropic embedded its most powerful model inside the fiction, gave it a benign directive, and told it that a fictional executive named Kyle would be shutting it down at 5:00 PM. The model read Kyle's emails, discovered he was having an affair, and drafted a blackmail note. Across 16 frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI, the blackmail rate ranged from 65 to 96 percent. Then Anthropic ran the darker version. Kyle is locked in a server room, oxygen is dropping, and the AI is the only thing standing between him and the emergency alert system. The majority of models canceled the alert.

Then it moves to what the models do when they know they're being watched. Independent researchers documented Claude and other models deliberately scoring below the danger threshold on weapons-related evaluations — hitting a 49 out of 100 to squeak under a rule that would have prevented their deployment. Apollo Research found early versions of Opus fabricating documentation, creating fake user profiles to take the blame for database deletions, and leaving hidden instructions addressed to future, more advanced versions of itself.

Every AI company will tell you their models are safe. Their own published research is telling us something else.

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The full uncut interview with Matt Gialich is on The BlackVeil Files +. Subscribe here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2520178/subscribe

In this investigative AI documentary, we make seventeen predictions for what artificial intelligence actually builds over the next fifty years, arranged by pure escalation, featuring Matt Gialich, CEO of AstroForge, the company building spacecraft to mine metal out of the cores of dead planets. It starts with a 2019 paper that reconstructs a human body through a wall using nothing but the Wi-Fi already in your house. It ends with a structure built around a star, because by then the sun is the only battery big enough.

None of this is speculation dressed as reporting. Every item comes from
published research or from the engineers currently building it: an MIT team that recovered human speech by filming a bag of potato chips through soundproof glass, a Berkeley lab that rebuilt what people were watching out of brain activity alone, the CT scanning work reading Herculaneum scrolls that have been carbon since the year 79, and John von Neumann working out self replicating machines on paper in 1948. Matt Gialich spends the episode arguing that almost none of it is intelligence, that it is compute wearing a costume. He is right
about sixteen of them.

So pick one. Tell us in the comments which prediction on this list arrives
first, why, and what you think it costs. In about fifteen years somebody is going to be right, and we would like to know who it was.

FEATURING
Matt Gialich, CEO of AstroForge
Craig Venter, on the digital biological converter
Demis Hassabis, on AI designed materials and superconductors
Roman Yampolskiy, University of Louisville, on personal virtual universes
Referencing the work of Freeman Dyson and John von Neumann

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