EP 188 Robert Tercek on Intellectual Property in the Time of AI

Jim talks with Robert Tercek about the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike and intellectual property rights in the era of generative AI. They discuss Los Angeles as a union town, Jim’s screenwriting helper software, likely impacts of AI on writers, the history of Hollywood union negotiations, the devaluation of human labor & humanity, motion picture companies of the future, the suit against Stable Diffusion, whether copyright laws will present obstacles to model-building, fair use, licensing, whether AIs “copy” works, knockoff Wes Anderson film trailers, AI’s threat to social media influencers, the rate of progress toward text-to-video systems, why ChatGPT empowers writers in the near term, the end of copyright extensions & why shorter terms enrich the commons, the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidance on non-human-generated works, the Errol Flynn defense, the percentage of jobs destroyed each year, AI for child self-education, and much more.