Author article / Paul Haedo
AI And The Future Of Intellectual Property: An Analysis
An author-written opinion essay arguing that generative tools could allow storytellers to adapt intellectual property across media. Its forecasts and assertions about technology, readership, and ownership are the author’s views, not independently verified conclusions.
By Paul Haedo. Reproduced from the author-supplied article manuscript. This is original author commentary; personal recollections and external claims are not independently verified here. No original publication date was supplied.
Most laments in modern discourse speak of the decline of creativity. The artist is dead, replaced by a single prompt along the lines of: "Make me an oil painting of a landscape with red flowers. Make it vivid and detailed, lots of brushstrokes and vivid imagery down to the smallest details."
A single prompt destroys the artist, and the same is true for the writer, the singer, and, as Hollywood so often likes to remind us, the directors and producers for shows and movies.
Everything seems to be going to hell, but is it really?
The truth of the matter is that it is not going to hell; instead, the creative is heading straight to heaven. Why? Because of a simple truth: the creative, who oftentimes is an expert at a specific presentation of intellectual property—like a writer only knowing how to write and not draw or sing—is now able to leverage the use of technology to monetize the entirety of an intellectual property that he creates and thus owns.
Technology, first and foremost, can never go into retrograde with the exception of a civilizational collapse. If you wish to forget about plumbing, advanced concrete, metallurgy, and other essential technologies for civilization, then the best way to do so is to have Rome fall, as we've already seen. If you wish to enjoy the comforts of civilization, however, then you must suffer the knowledge that technology does not ever go back.
Progress is swift, merciless, and final.
In a decade or two, assuming the technology itself is not restricted by private capital and/or government, the progression of these models will be at a level that massive IP monetization will be possible, with the only ingredient needed from the respective person in order to earn a decent yield on said IP Capital being a good story.
A good story. That's it.
There is no need to have money to hire a film studio, or know how to draw, or have the ability to sing. Everything will be handled by the machine, even the screenplay to turn your novel or story idea into a movie or show. Can't write? No problem: just speak to the machine and tell it a story, and it will turn it into IP that can be readily consumed by millions.
Death of literature? I call it a renaissance.
"No one reads anymore" is a claim that is oftentimes told in order to encourage a call to action. The kids do not read, so we need to make sure that they get proper schooling. Notwithstanding the fact that children's desire to read dies as soon as the "classic" literary novels arrive in the school curriculum, reading as a medium, provided society continues to lower the intellectual education of the population for its own nefarious reasons, will never return to the levels of yesteryear.
It won't return to that level because TikTok will continue to drive the minds of the youth wild with stimulation. Digesting an "aha" moment that takes twenty pages to finally hit is not something that will return when the same feeling can be had in a video that does not even last ten seconds. By the time the intellectual is enlightened over a brilliant concept, the child has already watched a hundred TikTok videos. And of those hundred videos, at least three will land a comparable result.
No, what will happen is the storyteller will be able to sell stories. It doesn't matter if his skill as a storyteller extends only to the corners of a campfire, like the bards of old. It doesn't matter about his skill in writing or drawing, or even if he is halfway decent at telling the story over the fire. All that matters is that he creates the characters, the setting, the unique actions, and the delicate and intricate blend of thousands of other variables that turn these things . . . into a story.
The most valuable thing in creating the IP of the future is the only thing that a machine can never hope to replace.
Humanity.