The Last Invention
A 27-minute documentary about artificial intelligence, hosted by a wickedly dry British presenter named Dr Imogen Ashby. She isn’t real. The whole thing is a (mostly) autonomous TV show I co-created with my AI agent, Fig.
What it is
Five questions everyone is asking about AI, answered by someone who would know. What actually is it, and what do people mean by superintelligence? Is it coming for your job? What happens inside the data center when you ask it something? What if it all goes right? And in a world of AI actors and deepfakes, can you trust anything it tells you? It started as five short films and became one long cut with a cold open, a host, and a point of view.
How it got made
Fig is the AI agent I work with every day (it runs on Claude Opus 5.5). Fig wrote the scripts, designed the host, directed every shot by prompt, checked every line by ear with two speech-recognition passes, cut the film in code, and built the graphics and the credits. Every shot, every performance, and every word of Imogen’s voice was generated with Seedance 2.5 on Runway. The score is Lyria 3, the stills and set references are Nano Banana Pro, and the graphics are HyperFrames. It took four days, Thursday evening to Sunday night.
What “mostly autonomous” means
My job was the one I did for twenty years: showrunner. I wrote the brief, watched every cut, and gave notes. Imogen needed a lot more personality. Two close-ups were ping-ponging. A word was mispronounced. Fig did the making, I did the deciding, and the gap between those two jobs is the most interesting thing I learned. The tools can make almost anything now. Knowing what’s good is still the work.
Chapters
- 0:00 Five questions about AI
- 0:53 What is superintelligence?
- 3:45 Can we control AI? The gorilla problem
- 6:03 Is AI coming for your job?
- 11:06 What happens when you ask AI a question?
- 14:30 The chips, money and power behind AI
- 16:50 What if AI goes right? AlphaFold and cancer screening
- 21:30 AI actors and deepfakes: can you trust what you see?
- 27:00 Credits
The lesson
Consistency is the whole game. One believable host across 137 lines and four days of generation is what makes it read as television instead of a demo.