Who Owns SpongeBob? AI Shakes Hollywood’s Creative Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Who Owns SpongeBob? AI Shakes Hollywood’s Creative Foundation

wsj.com

12 pointsjdkee20 comments

Investments into IP franchises like Star Wars and Marvel will diminish as children are able to generate their own ideas and universes on the fly. At scale, millions at a time.

Content houses will lose to content production tech.

Forget owning the rights to "The Office" when people can generate their own "The Office" content (memes, then episodes). And when the lawyer cats come clawing, it'll transform into "The Water Cooler" starring Jimmy Carrel and take place on Mars instead.

The value of content and ideas will become zero. The tools and distribution matter.

If there wasn't "The Office" to begin with, then what would people use to specify their version of "The Office"? Or how would that idea of "The Office" become popular in the first place for people to want to create their own version (Assuming the tools were in place to generate your own content)? I think there's a lot of value in communicating about shared ideas, eg people love to talk about movies/shows/etc, there's whole communities around a shared idea. I'm curious to see how individualized content impacts this.

"The Office" is a product of the convergent evolution of workplace satire that started well before "Dilbert". It occupies a shared space with "IT Crowd", "Silicon Valley", "Horrible Bosses", "Office Space", thousands of comics, articles, etc.

There will never be another "Office". People will continue to riff on it, produce fan fiction, and make pop culture references to it, but ultimately the next thing that occupies that space will be brand new.

Shapes of ideas are similar but get executed differently. And sometimes we stumble across some rather unique executions that speak to us at our moment in time and spread like wildfire.

I have no doubt people will continue doing this for as long as we remain a thinking species.

People have always been able to generate their own ideas and universes "on the fly" and they do, quite often.

Ideas matter, but execution matters most of all. And that's not something you get with AI. You get the superficial skin-deep idea with none of the depth to actually make anyone care about it.

you say this as if youtube poops haven’t existed for decades. the response from IP holders has always been to make an example out of the ones that get too popular so as to scare the rest into submission. When that doesn’t work, distribution platforms will change to suit the needs of the IP holders, or IP holders will crucify the distributors in court. And if all else fails, they will lobby the government to change laws in order to protect their assets.

Given the trajectory we're on, the same effort it took to create "Youtube Poops" will be able to produce quality music, visual effects, character arcs, and storytelling. And I'm sure companies will be highly incentivized to filtering this so the top content rises.

If they think it competes with their usage of the characters, they’ll nuke it from orbit. Whether that involves threatening the creators, the distributors, or the government.

You’re reciting contemporary history but the actual people who own those assets are dying.

100 years ago certain violations of religious norms were unconscionable.

I’m not so sure the next generation is inclined to babysit the sensibilities of those currently churning out of reality.

> I’m not so sure the next generation is inclined to babysit the sensibilities of those currently churning out of reality.

I love this quote so much. Thank you.

people aren’t protecting their copyright for religious or moral reasons. they’re doing it for a shitton of money. it’ll probably go away around the same time as land ownership.

Next generation won’t have the same direct benefit from those old ideas and is watching their buying power be deflated right how to insure them; old protectionism memes hold little value right now. If some app can just generate Mario quality gameplay that looks like anything, why pay Nintendo?

Generational churn and social media have gotten in the way of the “remember American history and pride.”

They quit teaching George Washington and the cherry tree nonsense in grade schools a while ago. A whole bunch of kids are growing up outside the filter bubble of 20+ years ago, and they’re voting age now, only going to become a bigger share of the voting bloc. They’ll be defining future social value stores and have no love for the old Empire.

They’re not post war shellshocked and Cold War paranoids that huffed leaded gas before its ban. A very different social mindset is aging into political power.

hollywood did a reasonable job fighting the internet in the early 2000s and is still around as a result

they have a lot of money and a lot of lawyers

They can't sue imagination or a traversal through concept embedding space. "Space Vampires Attack" is one of a limitless number of ideas, and I'm sure LLMs can do even better -

    "The Time-Traveling Samurai"
    "Ninja Apocalypse in Space"
    "Gothic Steampunk Symphony"
    "Robot Uprising in Atlantis"
    "Alien Invasion on the Old West"
    "Kaiju Battle Royale in New York City"
    "Post-Apocalyptic Circus Freaks"
    "Surrealist Noir Dreamscape"
    "Zombie Pirates of the Caribbean"
    "Cyberpunk Fairytale Revolution"

Or for the adults,

    "The Luminous Sea"
    "The Silent Symphony of Falling Leaves"
    "Neon Dreams in a Concrete Jungle"
    "The Fragile Beauty of Impermanence"
    "The Memory Keeper's Daughter"
    "The Gossamer Thread of Time"
    "The Solitude of the Last City"
    "The Haunting Melancholy of Longing"
    "The Weight of the Atlas Moth"
    "The Mosaic of Broken Colors"

(Thanks, ChatGPT. I would be intrigued by many of these. You're a good Bing.)

Kids are going to go wild with this tech. And after several years of experience, they'll get good. They'll grow up more experienced and with broader and deeper talents that Scorsese (who only made 20 films!)

> They can't sue imagination

well that's fine then, because we're talking about going after LLM operators

> Kids are going to go wild with this tech.

you're explicitly prohibited from using OpenAI if you're under 18

Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Some executives and creators in Hollywood say that AI technologies threaten originality in movies and TV. “AI uses what already exists out there and that doesn’t create innovation,” said Jason Blum

Blumhouse produces a lot of great movies, but I think "originality" is doing a lot of heavy lifting considering they've produced 5 Purge movies, the 12th and 13th Halloween movies, etc. That's not even to talk about the industry at large...

Roy Meirom, an investor and startup adviser focused on gaming and entertainment, said that rather than stifle creativity, AI raises the bar. “You’re going to have to be more creative,” he said, “more human and more creative than machines.”

I think previous advances in techniques and technology support this, for example, visual art when photography became more and more widespread: https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art...

This would all get a lot simpler if we'd go back to reasonable copyright terms. Say, the original US term of 14 years. Everything older than 14 years, do whatever you want, feed it to AI, all that stuff, its output is yours to do with as you please. Newer? Pay to license it for your training set, or don't have it at all if they don't want to sell (until the 14 years runs out, then do as you will).

This same issue's been a huge problem for human creators. It sucks that an adult film-maker can't directly play with ideas and characters that shaped their taste and vision when they were a child, and that older film-makers can't play with the work of their contemporaries from the early years of their career. We'd surely get overall better films if IP weren't as restricted—pick a super-famous franchise, and someone would have done some really great stuff with it, that currently doesn't exist because of IP law and the copyright holders getting to say what does and doesn't get made and sold. For god's sake, just look at all the fan fiction and fan films that get made, and people can't make money on those! The 14-year term would totally provide enough incentive for a flowering of commercial works based on recently-out-of-copyright content.

If you read "adult film-maker" in a different way this paragraph gets weird quickly :)

It’s kind of already happening

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh:_Blood_and_H...

https://archive.ph/lG0Ru

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