Disney sent a cease-and-desist. Netflix followed. Hollywood is swinging back, but is it already too late? AI video is not gonna cease, no pun intended, and the companies racing to build it aren't waiting for permission. Elsewhere, Mark Zuckerberg sat before a jury this week in a trial that could reshape the entire social media industry, and somewhere between the courtrooms and the code, nations are quietly preparing for wars fought not by soldiers, but by robots powered by AI. The world is shifting fast. Let's make sense of it together. Stay curious.
The End of Hollywood as We Know It
In February 2026, ByteDance launched Seedance 2.0, an AI video tool that generates hyper-realistic footage from a single photo and a text prompt. Within hours, the internet was flooded with convincing fake films featuring real stars and copyrighted characters. Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros., and Paramount fired cease-and-desist letters almost immediately, calling it an unprecedented smash-and-grab of their IP. ByteDance offered vague assurances. Netflix gave them three days. None of it matters. Even if Seedance disappears tomorrow, the technology cannot be uninvented. Open-source equivalents are already proliferating in jurisdictions that don’t share American copyright protections. And tellingly, Disney — while threatening ByteDance in court — quietly signed a billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI to use its characters in Sora. The studios aren’t fighting AI video. They’re fighting for a seat at the table before someone takes it from them. The more serious threat isn’t to Hollywood’s bottom line, it’s to reality itself. When photorealistic footage of anyone doing anything can be created in minutes and spread in hours, our ability to trust what we see collapses entirely. News. Court evidence. Political events. All of it becomes suspect. And when AI can generate an infinite, perfectly personalized video feed tailored to your exact tastes, the addictive pull will make TikTok look like a library card. The studios will adapt, legislate, and litigate. But they are defending a world that is already receding. The question now isn’t whether AI reshapes visual culture, it’s whether we’ll have any shared sense of reality left when it does. 📰 AI News and Trends
Other Tech News
Zuckerberg on Trial, and So Is the Entire Social Media Industry
Mark Zuckerberg took the stand this week in a Los Angeles courtroom in what may be the most consequential legal moment of his career. At the center of K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms is a 20-year-old California woman who alleges Meta deliberately engineered its platforms to addict young users, contributing to her depression and suicidal ideation. The evidence emerging from the trial has been damning: a 2015 email chain showed Zuckerberg himself pushing to increase users’ time-in-app by 12%, directly contradicting his earlier Congressional testimony, while internal Meta documents revealed that roughly 30% of American children aged 10–12 had Instagram accounts as far back as 2015, and that Meta’s own research found parental supervision does little to curb teens’ compulsive use. The interesting part is that Zuckerberg and many tech executives do not want their own kids near social media, but definitely profit from other minors using the technology. Zuckerberg largely deflected, claiming documents were taken out of context and pointing to Apple as a more capable enforcer of age verification, a posture of strategic deniability that may define the case’s outcome. The stakes extend well beyond Meta: a verdict for the plaintiff could shatter Big Tech’s longstanding Section 230 liability shield, exposing the industry to billions in damages and forcing fundamental platform redesigns. This courtroom drama is unfolding against a sweeping global backdrop where countries like Australia already banned social media for children under 16 in December 2025, and Denmark, France, Spain, Malaysia, Slovenia, Greece, Germany, and the UK are all moving toward similar restrictions, each wrestling with the same core tension between child protection and civil liberties concerns around invasive age verification. What’s quietly on trial here isn’t just one company’s conduct, but the foundational assumption that platforms bear no responsibility for the psychological architecture they deliberately build, and governments worldwide are no longer willing to wait for the verdict. 📚Learning CornerHarvard Science in the News — “Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A Battle for Your Time” How will the next War be fought? We'll leave you with a sobering thought. While the world debates social media addiction and AI-generated video, a quieter and far more consequential arms race is underway. In our Other Tech News section, we look at how nations are rapidly militarizing artificial intelligence — and how China, in particular, is moving toward a war-fighting model built entirely around robotics: ground units, aerial swarms, humanoid machines, all coordinated by AI with no human on the front line. The software, the hardware, and the very concept of war are all changing simultaneously. If the past week taught us anything, it's that technology moves faster than our ability to govern it. On every front. 🧰 AI Tools of The DayVideo Generators
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Thursday, February 19, 2026
🎬 The End of Hollywood as We Know It
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