AI YI YI

Threading the AI Needle

By Ken Sheetz

For some time now, I’ve been sounding the alarm about the way AI is being rolled out. Not AI itself—I use it every day—but the reckless IPO gold rush surrounding it and the terrible way we’re building it.

Let’s separate two very different conversations.

The AI Elizabeth and I use it as a glorified intern with an incredible memory. It helps two the of us — who have remained current on tech our long and successful careers — analyze projects, proofread emails, brainstorm story ideas, and tackle the mountain of mundane work that comes with running multiple businesses and developing a large slate of films. It saves us countless hours. It doesn’t replace anyone because we’re the ones who would have been doing all that work ourselves anyway.

But the AI making headlines, isn’t being built primarily so seniors like us can launch a slate of film and run a gadget biz. It’s being built because there’s unimaginable money and power at stake.

That’s the AI that worries me.

I don’t lose sleep over AI helping me write emails, presentations for investors or blog posts (like this one). I lose sleep over an economic system where a handful of autocratic companies become weaalthier and more powerful than governments. History tells us that concentrated power—whether political or corporate—never gives itself away voluntarily.

We’re talking Skynet for real.

Then there’s the infrastructure disaster.

Tech bros are racing, to be THE IPO winner to build massive data centers that consume astonishing amounts of electricity and water while communities are often left paying the environmental bill and becoming ill from noise and pollution. That conversation deserves far more public attention than it’s getting.

The solution to low energy-AI looks more likely to come out of China. Which is also why far too many American data centers and satellite systems are rushing to market.

Back to film. Actors should own their faces. Writers should own their words. Artists should own their voices. Every one of us should own our own likeness. No company should be able to copy, clone, or monetize another human being without clear, informed consent and fair compensation.

That isn’t anti-technology.

That’s pro-human.

As for movies, I remain convinced that films created by real actors, real directors, real crews, and real human collaboration will remain the premium experience even after AI films come into the market. We don’t go to concerts because radio exist. We go because people exist.

Technology should expand human freedom—not quietly engineer a future where we become dependent on systems controlled by a tiny group of dissociated from reality billionaires.

I’ll close by saying if AI ever writes my obituary after I’m gone, I at least hope it remembers to mention that I was right about needing more guardrails... and that my wife and partner, a 17 year military vet, Elizabeth and primarily me, a 30 year film vet with an enviable track record, did all the hard work of writing screenplays over the past 30 years that form our IP.

And we’ll keep sounding the alarm the too much AI is too much of a good thing.

Ken and Elizabeth present their human written $2 billion slate of Overactive Imagination Pictures films at the 2025 AFM - American Film Market.