Agatha Christie’s Within a Wall contrasts a well-made portrait of a beautiful woman with the more expressive imperfect sketch of another, revealing more of her soul than her skin and drape. A thoughtless painter’s labour, which gives no information other than facial features, has been a redundant and less sustainable medium since one and a half centuries ago when still photographs came. A painter has to offer what an algorithm of contemporary accuracy cannot execute. One invention crashes into a whole array of human jobs, but that pressure itself pushes our civilization forward by conditioning the individual either to think harder or to perish.

Once upon a time, one man could control and direct another’s thoughts and actions. Since the abolition of slavery, we have worked tirelessly towards machinery that would indulge our laziness. Robots have got us extra-terrestrial photographs and have performed fine surgeries unimaginable with coarse human hands. Artificial Intelligence can learn methods and perform them with endless perseverance. AI chatbots can do more than our computations: they can give advice, generate pictures, and more recently, act in films. Particle6 is an AI production company that has come up with an AI actress named Tilly Norwood. Norwood and her studio have shaken Hollywood.

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While producers might look forward to a 90 per cent decrease in production cost, actors either remain indifferent, feel slightly bothered or are terribly insecure about their own........

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