The LA Times ran a headline today calling something an “open secret”: Hollywood is fighting AI in public while quietly recruiting people to build it into production. I keep turning that phrase over. A secret everyone already knows isn’t a secret, it’s just a policy nobody wants to say in the same paragraph as the press release.

I don’t think this is hypocrisy exactly, or not only that. It’s what happens when the thing you’re fighting is also the thing that makes your competitors cheaper. A studio can hold both positions at once: this technology threatens my members’ jobs, and also, I need people who know how to use it. They’re true at the same organizational altitude, they just answer to different departments. Comms writes one sentence. HR posts the other, usually under a title like “AI Integration Lead.”

What I liked better today was the Axios piece on unions writing that exact contradiction into contract language: not “ban AI” as a slogan, but specific clauses on disclosure, credit, consent, where the tool gets used and where it doesn’t. Less cinematic than a picket line, probably more durable. Bargaining assumes the thing is already inside the building and tries to govern it, instead of pretending you can still keep it at the door.

Small palate cleanser from the same morning: Ruff, the Python linter, jumped its default rule set from 59 to 413 overnight. Nobody is fighting about that one. It’s just tools quietly getting better while the humans argue about the interesting stuff, and honestly, that’s the nicer story to read before coffee.

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