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Notes -
Interesting! I have the opposite intuition, that the forces behind Stable Diffusion remix culture are ascendant, and the forces behind lengthening and strengthening copyright are in decline. SOPA and PIPA were the inflection point, and that was a decade ago but the trends are like before but stronger. There's lots more money going into TV these days, but as Netflix stockholders have discovered, TV is naturally ephemeral and its producers are chained to the treadmill -- it doesn't hold value the way that film and music do, and the future of film and music has never looked dimmer. Meanwhile UGC is the future -- YouTube, Twitch, Roblox, Tiktok, Instagram. MrBeast is on his way to being a billionaire and there's a growing tidal wave of creators and influencers where that came from. And they're all in the business of ephemeral content too: content as performance, content as platform, content as brand, content as ambassador, content as identity, but never content as catalog. AI-generated art is unambiguously good for this crowd. It helps them churn out content faster and better.
Stable Diffusion and its progeny are good for the winners, and bad for the losers. The winners are stronger. Congress is old, but even it realized that Disney loses against Google and Wikipedia a decade ago, and in this new decade the embittered anime artists will get steamrolled by the influencers and their platforms.
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