By LAURAN NEERGAARD (AP Medical Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists studying a family plagued by early-in-life Alzheimer’s found some carry a genetic oddity that delays their initial symptoms by five years.

The finding points to novel ways of fighting the mind-robbing disease – if researchers can unravel how a single copy of that very rare gene variant offers at least a little protection.

“It opens new avenues,” said neuropsychologist Yakeel Quiroz of Massachusetts General Hospital, who helped lead the study published Wednesday. “There are definitely opportunities to copy or mimic the effects.”

The first hint of this genetic protection came a few years ago. Researchers were studying a huge family in Colombia that shares a devastating inherited form of Alzheimer’s when they discovered one woman who escaped her genetic fate. Aliria Piedrahita de Villegas should have developed Alzheimer’s symptoms in her 40s but instead made it to her 70s before suffering even mild cognitive trouble.

The big clue: She also harbored something incredibly rare, two copies of an unrelated gene named APOE3 that had a mutation dubbed Christchurch. That odd gene pair appeared to shield her, staving off her genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s.

Quiroz’s team then tested more than 1,000 extended family members, and identified 27 who carry a single copy of that Christchurch variant.

But would one copy be enough to offer any protection? Those Christchurch carriers on average showed their first signs of cognitive trouble at age 52, five years later than their relatives, concluded a collaboration that includes Mass General Brigham researchers and Colombia’s University of Antioquia.

The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, are encouraging, said Dr. Eliezer Masliah of the National Institute on Aging.

“It gives you a lot of comfort that modifying one of the copies could be really helpful,” at least in helping to delay the disease, he said.

Already some very early work is beginning to explore if certain treatments might induce the protective mutation, he added.

More than 6 million Americans, and an estimated 55 million people worldwide, have Alzheimer’s. Less than 1% of cases are like the Colombian family’s, caused by a gene passed through generations that triggers the disease at unusually young ages.

Alzheimer’s usually is a disease of people over age 65 and while simply getting older is the main risk, the APOE gene has long been known to play some role. It comes in three main varieties. Carrying one copy of the notorious APOE4 gene increases the risk — and recent research found that having two copies of APOE4 can actually cause Alzheimer’s in seniors. Another variety, APOE2, seems to reduce the risk while APOE3 has long been considered neutral.

Then came discovery of the Christchurch variant’s seemingly protective role.

Silent changes in the brain precede Alzheimer’s symptoms by at least two decades — including buildup of a sticky protein called amyloid that, once it reaches certain levels, appears to trigger tangles of another protein, called tau, that kill brain cells. Earlier research has suggested something about the Christchurch variant impedes that tau transition.

Wednesday’s study included brain scans from two people with a single Christchurch copy and autopsy analysis of four others who’d died. Quiroz cautioned there’s still a lot to learn about how the rare variant affects the underlying Alzheimer’s process — including whether it affects the common old-age type — but said tau and inflammation are among the suspects.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Artificial Intelligence is primed to take over Hollywood with all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall.

Proponents of AI are making bold promises. That potentially means human creativity will be replaced by the theft — sorry, data scraping — of pre-existing words, sounds, images and ideas. Jobs will be lost as human actors and crew are eliminated from the process. Clean water will be wasted, with billions of gallons needed to cool data centers. What will be left is anyone’s guess.

Despite these concerns, AI has found (bought?) a berth at film festivals, which purportedly exist to celebrate the art of cinema. At Cannes this year, a producer was hawking AI translations of international films. Actors who make a living dubbing such films? Soon to be obsolete apparently.

Earlier this month, a Korean film festival in the city of Bucheon launched its first competition dedicated to AI filmmaking. And closer to home, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York featured a program of short films made with generative AI.

Among the filmmakers taking part was Nikyatu Jusu, the writer-director of the horror feature “Nanny,” which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2022. My colleague Michael Phillips called it an “eerie, assured feature film debut,” and it also got a home video release from the prestigious Criterion Collection. All of this is background to say: Jusu is respected and her work is well-regarded. So it came as a shock to many that she was embracing AI.

That’s because she expressed her own concerns a year ago on social media: “Can’t stop thinking about all the various ways AI will be used to replace living, breathing minoritized artists already struggling to tell their own stories. AI will become mock representation — an empty mimicry of Black and brown people’s light commodified and vomited back to us.”

These are valid concerns. But last week she was promoting her Tribeca premiere on Twitter with a still image from the film and the caption: “Crucify me now, get it out of your system.” Some people engaged in good faith. “Not an attempt to crucify: What made the plagiarism tool attractive as a filmmaker?” someone said. “Ask the people who created it and studio execs who are currently implementing it,” she replied. “Odd to ask the creatives at the bottom adapting to inevitable change … this is here whether you kick and scream or not.”

I don’t know that AI-made films are inevitable, but let’s table that for a moment.

“This is so depressing,” someone else said. “I know,” she replied facetiously, “so many Black faces.”

But of course, none of the faces in her film belong to actual Black people. Those images were constructed from real people who did not give their consent, nor did they receive compensation. How is that a win for representation? To quote Jusu’s own words, this is “mock representation” and “empty mimicry.”

Others were less polite in their comments and Jusu eventually deactivated her account. I reached out to see if she would be open to talking but did not get a response. Some questions I would have asked: What was it like making a film this way? Was it creatively fulfilling? What did she learn from using this technology? Is she allowed to talk freely about the experience, or was she asked to sign an NDA prohibiting her from discussing the tech in anything but glowing terms?

People make all kinds of decisions for reasons we aren’t privy to. Sometimes there are financial considerations. Sometimes people simply rethink where they stand: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So I would have also asked: What changed her mind about AI?

I hope Jusu is given grace for what might have been a decision made under stressful conditions — funding and jobs have dried up for many in Hollywood at the moment, where everyone is encouraged to “stay alive until ’25” — but I also hope that, going forward, she gets more opportunities to make films the traditional way.

But we should be wary of AI for ethical and philosophical reasons alone. According to the Human Rights Watch, “personal photos of Brazilian children are being used to create powerful artificial intelligence tools without the children’s knowledge or consent.” According to another report, Google image search is “serving users AI-generated images of celebrities in swimsuits and not indicating that the images are AI-generated” and in some cases, those celebrities “are made to look like underage children.”

Even from a craven capitalistic point of view, does it seem odd that studios aren’t more vocal about potential copyright infringement?

What will remain of Hollywood if AI is embraced over human creativity and efforts? (LPETTET/Getty)

There are aesthetic concerns as well.

As of last year, Robert Zemeckis had plans for a movie starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright that will use “new hyperrealistic technology including AI-generated face replacements and de-aging to allow its stars to tell a story that spans generations.”

Directors used to simply cast other actors to play different versions of the same character — and happily, many still do. That’s one of the more enjoyable aspects of “Interview with the Vampire” on AMC. The show didn’t opt for de-aging software to make 71-year-old Eric Bogosian look younger for scenes set in the past, but hired 36-year-old Luke Brandon Field, who looks a lot like Bogosian and has the talent to emulate his performance. One of my favorite examples is 11-year-old Mayim Bialik playing the younger version of Bette Midler’s character in 1988’s “Beaches.” As a viewer, I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want actors to lose those opportunities, either.

There are other potential uses for AI floating around, one of which was recently touted by Ashton Kutcher: “You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie. Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”

I can not imagine anything worse. After a long day, I have to do more work just to watch something entertaining? How bleak! “What if each time you watched a movie, it played out differently?” teased another news report. “The idea is to use AI to mix up scenes and create completely different versions of the same movie each time it is played.”

These are terrible ideas.

“Going all the way back to gathering around the fire, we like to be together to tell stories, it’s important to us,” technologist and media analyst Sydette Harry told me. “Cinema was another physical manifestation of that. Social media is the digital manifestation.”

Ashton Kutcher is one famous proponent of AI. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

The word community gets tossed around a lot and may have been flattened in the process. But experiencing entertainment together can be a cultural bonding agent, which has been fractured by the binge-release model on streaming. These proposed uses for AI will fracture the experience even further.

“Another thing about AI,” Harry said, “is that it likes to put a definitive stamp on things: This is ‘the knowledge’ because we’ve scraped all there is to know. Well, we really don’t know all there is to know.” There is an entire history of existence that has not been digitized, which means as far as AI is concerned, it doesn’t exist.

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There’s an assumption that if you’re resistant to AI, you don’t want progress, Harry said. “But if you want creative progress, you have to leave space for things to be sloppy” and allow for ideas to spring from imperfections and happy accidents. “Think about the things in cinema that are really amazing. If you were in a real gunfight, the one thing you never want to do is the traditional John Woo limbs-akimbo pose. But it looks amazing on screen and now it’s a signature thing dreamed up by an amazing filmmaker.”

“People’s discomfort with the human learning process — and the ability to play around — should not become the guide rails for our art forms,” she said. “We have to allow for it if you want any kind of culture. Putting it through a computer that has weighted judgments about what’s important? Well, that makes somebody in an executive office feel good and then nobody has to be accountable for what a show or film is saying because the black box of the computer said it.”

Even if AI is a cheaper way to make films initially, I suspect that will change; once studios become reliant on it, prices will go up (not unlike Uber’s pricing trajectory) but it will be harder for studios to go back to the “old” way because fewer people will have the necessary skills anymore.

It’s worth hearing out the concerns of people who don’t have a financial stake in AI’s domination. Privacy expert Meredith Whittaker recently described the AI business model this way: “It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to train these models, so there is deep pressure from companies — that are basically promising God and delivering email prompts — to make some return on investment in this technology.”

Timnit Gebru is a researcher in AI ethics and she is less convinced the technology is a fait accompli: “This ‘it is inevitable’ discourse is designed to disempower. It’s not inevitable. These dudes don’t need to be handed ridiculous amounts of money to realize their dystopian utopia.”

And according to at least one recent headline: “Payoff from AI projects is ‘dismal’, biz leaders complain.” Despite the marketing and propaganda, AI isn’t even the golden goose.

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.