If you’ve been onYouTubein the past couple of years, you might have been served a trailer for a movie that, by all accounts, should not exist. It could be a movie that has never been made, or one that would be impossible to make as it features actors who are no longer with us, or footage from older movies combined with eerie and uncanny AI creations. These trailers are great news for those wanting to see a “what if” scenario play out in front of their eyes, but probably not great for IP owners around the world, right? Maybe not, as it seems that studios have already started raking in ad revenue from these trailers, as reported byDeadline.
While the users who generate this content argue that their videos help promote big studio films likeMission ImpossibleandThe Fantastic Four, talent unions, like SAG-AFTRA, that protect actors and other media professionals, take a very different view. In a statement shared withDeadline, the union said:
“Just as SAG-AFTRA is aggressively bargaining contract terms and creating laws to protect and enforce our members’ voice and likeness rights, we expect our bargaining partners to aggressively enforce their IP from any, and all AI misappropriation. Monetizing unauthorized, unwanted, and subpar uses of human-centered IP is a race to the bottom. It incentivizes technology companies and short-term gains at the expense of lasting human creative endeavor.”
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With YouTube channels that garner billions of aggregate views on what many call AI slop, there is certainly ad revenue to be amassed from so many clicks. Ultimately, this income stream is paltry compared to what giant media companies make from all ticket sales, streaming distribution, and licensing deals to name a few, so artists and unions are miffed about the shortsighted gains as studios seem to be stepping over dollars to pick up pennies at the expense of human talent.Despite words from media company CEOs, creatives are already angry about the lack of copyright enforcement and companies selectively throwing their hands up.
The Great Outsourcing Of Imagination
The internet has been full of fake trailers and bogus images for movies almost since bandwidths could handle it. Since its inception, the web has been used to propagate scams, fraud, grifts and malware. Did you really think you could download all of Led Zeppelin’s discography on Limewire in a mere 32kb file? But now, instead of downloading a virus that ruins the family computer, we’re viewing fake content that, more harmfully, reduces creativity to a brainless whim and destroys our cognitive immunity to disinformation and lies. And asHayao Miyazaki said about AI,whose work has recently been folded into slop regurgitation machines, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
As Hollywood goes through an existential crisis at the collision of intellectual property rights and artificial intelligence, creators are largely left to sit back and watch as studios more willingly embrace technology that undercuts the people who make entertainment a uniquely human endeavor. Deadline approached all the major studios for insight into this flaunting of copyright for ad revenue revelation, which all declined to comment.
