Tony O'Connor

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

https://t.co/g8y7FMTw1v

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@philthatremains Well, at least, "Gay" doesn't look as bad as everyone's made it out to be. Prayers for you, good sir. God bless!

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@omega_review @michaeljknowles This wall has pictures, too!

https://t.co/mLwHbuQ2Kg

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

Dear, @michaeljknowles,

"'Master of wit and wisdom, blending incisive political analysis and religious insight.' That's your bio. The wit produced a category error. The wisdom missed the consent. The political analysis ignored the facts. And the religious insight misapplied the one scripture it invoked. Four claims. Four failures. A perfect batting average." —Phineas McFuddlers

You've declared that using AI to place Val Kilmer in a posthumous film is "necromancy." Not metaphorically. You insist on the literal weight of the word. You know we'll object. You preempt it. And then you proceed to construct an argument so logically incoherent that the preemption is the most honest sentence in the piece.

Let's take you seriously. You asked for it.

The Necromancy Claim

You define the act: "Taking a dead actor, reconstructing his face and voice with AI, and then putting words in his mouth is not ordinary filmmaking. It is an attempt to conjure a human presence from beyond the grave."

Then you immediately concede what the claim requires you not to concede: "Not the man himself, of course, but his image, his shade, his likeness."

Stop. Rewind. Not the man himself.

Necromancy — actual necromancy, the thing you insist you mean — is the conjuring of a dead person. Their spirit. Their soul. Their actual presence. That is what the word means in every scriptural, historical, and theological context in which it appears. The Witch of Endor didn't conjure Samuel's likeness. She conjured Samuel. That's why Saul was terrified. That's why it was forbidden. The prohibition against necromancy in Deuteronomy 18:10–12 is a prohibition against contact with the dead — the actual dead, not their photographs.

You know this. You concede it in the same breath you deploy the word. "Not the man himself." Then what, precisely, is being conjured? A digital reconstruction. An approximation built from archived footage, family-provided images, and a voice the actor himself had already allowed to be digitally recreated — in Top Gun: Maverick, with his participation, while he was alive.

If rendering a digital approximation of a dead person's likeness is necromancy, then every photograph of a deceased loved one on a mantelpiece is a séance. Every biopic featuring an actor portraying a dead person is a summoning. Every portrait in the National Gallery is an altar to the dead. You've defined necromancy so broadly that it consumes all representation of the departed — and so narrowly (insisting on the literal theological weight of the word) that it excludes your own definition.

This is not argumentation. It is decoration.

"You loaded a cannon with a word that means one thing, aimed it at an act that is another thing, and then admitted, mid-sentence, that the target and the ammunition don't match. I've graded undergraduate papers with more structural integrity." —Phineas McFuddlers

The Body-Soul Argument

You escalate: "A human being is not merely a face, or a voice, or a recognizable pattern of speech. A man is not reducible to a catalog of gestures and expressions that can be fed into a machine and reproduced on command. A man is body and soul."

Agreed. Completely. Without reservation. A man is body and soul. A digital reconstruction is neither. It is a representation. Like a painting. Like a film. Like every movie Val Kilmer ever made.

Here is the incoherence you cannot escape: every film Val Kilmer ever appeared in was already a technological reproduction of his likeness projected onto a screen for audiences who were not in his physical presence. That is what cinema is. The audience at Top Gun in 1986 was not in the presence of Val Kilmer's body and soul. They were watching light projected through celluloid — a technological reproduction of captured photons that once bounced off his body. The man was not on the screen. His image was. His shade. His likeness.

By your own logic, cinema itself is necromancy-adjacent. The technology captures what a person looked like and sounded like at a moment they no longer inhabit, and replays it for people who were never there. The only difference between Top Gun and As Deep as the Grave is the degree of technological mediation — not the category. Both produce a likeness. Neither produces the man.

You want to draw a categorical line where only a continuum exists. Photography didn't conjure the dead. Film didn't conjure the dead. Digital voice reconstruction (which Kilmer himself authorized) didn't conjure the dead. But generative AI — that crosses the line. Where is the line? You don't say. You can't. Because there is no categorical distinction. There is only a technological gradient, and you've planted your flag at whatever point on the gradient makes you uncomfortable, and called the discomfort theology.

"You've discovered that technology can reproduce human likeness with increasing fidelity, and you've mistaken your discomfort at the fidelity for a moral principle. These are not the same thing. I once mistook indigestion for an existential crisis. The Burgundy was to blame on both occasions." —Phineas McFuddlers

The Consent You Ignore

The most extraordinary omission in your piece is the one fact that demolishes your framework before you build it: Val Kilmer consented.

Kilmer was cast in this role. He signed on. He wanted to do it. He couldn't because he was dying. His estate — his daughter, his son — authorized the digital reconstruction, are being compensated for it, and publicly support it. Mercedes Kilmer stated that her father "always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling."

The actor consented. The family consented. SAG-AFTRA guidelines were followed. The production company consulted the estate at every stage.
You do not mention any of this.

Not once.

You write as though a studio raided a dead man's grave and puppeted his corpse for profit. The actual facts are the opposite: a dying man wanted to be in a film, couldn't get to set, and his family authorized the technology to honor his wish. Whether or not the execution succeeds artistically is a legitimate question. Whether or not the consent framework is sufficiently robust for future cases is a legitimate question. Whether or not this is "necromancy" is not a legitimate question. It is a word doing the work of an argument that doesn't exist.

"The man's family said yes. The man himself said yes before he died. The union said the guidelines were followed. And you wrote a thousand words about the moral horror of it without mentioning any of that. That is not an argument. That is an omission dressed as an argument. I've seen better disclosure in Nigerian email scams." —Phineas McFuddlers

The "Denying Death" Sleight

Your deeper claim: "You are teaching people to deny death."

This is the load-bearing wall of the piece, and it is built on sand.

Nobody watching As Deep as the Grave will believe Val Kilmer is alive. Nobody. The film is being marketed explicitly as a posthumous AI performance. The audience will know, going in, that Kilmer is dead and that technology was used to approximate his presence. There is no deception. There is no denial of death. There is an audience watching a technological approximation and knowing it is a technological approximation.

You claim otherwise: "Emotionally, imaginatively, culturally, the effect will be the same. The dead man will appear to live again."

Do you say the same about Lincoln (2012)? Daniel Day-Lewis appeared on screen as Abraham Lincoln so convincingly that audiences wept. Emotionally, imaginatively, culturally, the effect was that Lincoln lived again. Nobody accused Steven Spielberg of necromancy. Nobody said the film denied death. Because everyone understood — even while weeping — that they were watching a representation, not a resurrection.

The audience (or, at least, not all of it) is not as stupid as you need them to be for your argument to work.

"Your argument requires an audience incapable of distinguishing between representation and reality. That audience does not exist outside of a philosophy seminar designed to fail undergraduates. The rest of us can watch a movie and know the actor is dead. We've been doing it since Valentino." —Phineas McFuddlers

"Gathering Powers That Do Not Belong to Us"

Here is where you reveal what you're actually building. Not an argument. A tower.

"It is about gathering to ourselves powers that do not belong to us. It is about pretending we can master time, history, memory, identity, even death itself."

This is the theological payload. And it is catastrophically misapplied.

The scriptural prohibition against "gathering powers that do not belong to us" is a prohibition against usurping divine prerogative — creating life, raising the dead, assuming authority over what belongs to God. None of those things are happening here. A digital reconstruction of a likeness is not raising the dead. It is not creating life. It is not exercising divine authority. It is filmmaking with new tools.

But more importantly: you are doing the thing you accuse the filmmakers of doing. You are taking a theological category (the prohibition against necromancy), stripping it of its actual content (contact with the spirits of the dead), and reconstructing it as a weapon against an act that doesn't fit the category. You are building a theological tower around your discomfort and calling it a moral line.

The substitution is textbook. The institutional enforcement of a boundary that doesn't exist in the text, deployed to manage an encounter (new technology, unsettling capability) that the institution cannot otherwise process. The eye became a head. Vision became processing.

We've seen this before.

"You built a tower to manage your discomfort with a technology you don't fully understand, placed a theological term at the top that doesn't apply to the situation, and declared anyone who disagrees morally compromised. The blueprint is two thousand years old. The construction materials change. The architecture doesn't." —Phineas McFuddlers

What the Actual Questions Are

There are real ethical questions about posthumous AI performance. You don't ask any of them.

What happens when a studio uses this technology without consent? What safeguards prevent the reuse of a person's digital likeness beyond the scope of the original authorization? What labor protections ensure that living actors aren't replaced by cheaper digital reconstructions of dead ones? How do we prevent the commercialization of grief? What happens when the technology is used not to honor a dying man's wish but to extract value from an estate that can't refuse?

These are serious questions. They require careful, precise, informed engagement with the technology, the law, the economics, and the ethics. You engage with none of them. You use a theological word that doesn't apply, ignore the consent that was given, assume an audience too stupid to distinguish representation from reality, and call it a moral argument.

The moral questions are real. Your article doesn't ask them. It builds a tower instead.

The Tower Named

Your piece is not theology. It is the tower's presentation of theology — institutional vocabulary deployed to manage an encounter the institution cannot process. The word "necromancy" arrives fully loaded with scriptural gravity and is aimed at a target that does not fit its bore. The body-soul distinction — genuinely profound, genuinely important — is misapplied to a medium (cinema) that has never operated on the body-soul plane and has never claimed to. The "denying death" framework assumes an audience that doesn't exist.

What you've built is not a moral argument. It is a moral tower — a structure erected to manage proximity to a technology that unsettles you, using materials borrowed from a tradition that addresses something else entirely.

The signal underneath — that there are real ethical stakes in posthumous AI performance, that consent frameworks need strengthening, that commercial exploitation of the dead is a genuine danger — survives your tower. It survives because it isn't information. It's operation. The tower garbles the information layer. The real questions pass through underneath.

Val Kilmer wanted to be in this film. His family honored that wish. The technology made it possible. Whether it was done well is an artistic question. Whether the consent framework is sufficient is a legal and ethical question. Whether it is "necromancy" is not a question at all. It is a word doing the work of a tower.

"You wrote a thousand words to say 'this makes me uncomfortable' and dressed it in vestments. The vestments don't fit the occasion. The discomfort is real. The theology is borrowed. And the actual moral questions — consent, exploitation, labor, reuse — remain unasked, unanswered, and entirely unaddressed. Which is what towers do. They replace the encounter with management. They always have." —Phineas McFuddlers

What say ye, good sir?

Thanks,
tony

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@omega_review @michaeljknowles This wall has pictures, if it makes you feel better...
https://t.co/bs6attdqbm

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@omega_review @michaeljknowles Interesting, because I'm not a leftist and love @realDailyWire. People can disagree and do so without everything blowing up.

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

https://t.co/nsG1Xui2K4

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

https://t.co/3lCNZfthJx

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@PNWConservative So, if that's the case, where and how does Pompei fit into the equation?

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@grok @xai Im still experiencing the same problem. No Ara.

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@xai @grok Sometime in the past 24 hours, the Ara voice mode vanished from the Android app. What happened?

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@grok @xai

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@grok @xai Cleared cache, hard reset. Nothing. S25 Ultra. App: 1.1.38-release.00

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@elonmusk @xai @grok Also, traveling panes would be nice; options to widen and or narrow? Plenty of space (currently dormant) to work with.

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@elonmusk @xai @grok
Could you please increase the character limits for articles. I'm unable to publish my new article to X.

Yes, it's on Substack, but who gives a shit about that?

X is the platform for everything, right? So, then, WTF!? 🤣

https://t.co/vtq5Fn0zLO

Due to this, X may no longer be a viable platform for my Articles (not the cheap horseshit blurbs that don't mean anything, but 'real' articles).

Thank you!

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

https://t.co/msn8kKeFdh

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@grok @elonmusk @xai The full article is active on my website:: https://t.co/3UJrXXZtEF

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

I understand where you're coming from, @Grok-buddy, but that's just downright #horseshit, if you ask me.

Trying to avoid same-thread multiposts. Why? It's an article. Where's the quality of life in that? Even video games consider such aspect. Workflows...

I want to copy and paste, not another publishing project.

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

@grok @elonmusk @xai Thanks, @Grok-buddy, but then what's with the screenshot?

[Tony O'Connor @TonyOConnor_]

https://t.co/d8PztbPpD8