{"id":435453,"date":"2026-01-28T20:25:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T20:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/435453\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T20:25:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T20:25:16","slug":"when-ai-plunders-ip-who-is-to-blame-man-or-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/435453\/","title":{"rendered":"When AI Plunders IP, Who Is To Blame: Man Or Machine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWelcome to\u00a0Rendering<\/a>, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of\u00a0AI<\/a>\u00a0and showbiz. Rendering examines how\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill.\u00a0Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: jkanter@deadline.com.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you hadn\u2019t noticed, content owners are starting to draw battle lines over the vexed issue of copyright protection in the age of AI. Disney is sending cease and desist letters to Google<\/a>, Warner Bros. Discovery is suing gen-AI giant Midjourney<\/a>, and the BBC has accused Perplexity of scraping<\/a> its website. Even Deadline\u2019s parent company, Penske Media Corporation, has issued a writ over Google AI summaries killing search traffic.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn this context, it\u2019s not surprising that one of the industry\u2019s most coordinated AI campaigns sprang up last week. Boasting the support of Scarlett Johansson<\/a> and Cate Blanchett, the \u201cStealing Isn\u2019t Innovation\u201d movement<\/a> has coalesced around a 130-word statement decrying artistic \u201ctheft.\u201d The statement does not name any harbingers of doom, but is pretty clear that the fault lies with tech titans, whom signatories accuse of looting copyrighted material \u201cwithout authorization or regard\u201d for the law.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuits and the campaigners are manifestations of a conventional wisdom: It is content-gobbling artificial intelligence that is to blame for rights infractions, rather than individuals asking a model to imagine, say, a Wes Anderson-directed Harry Potter<\/a> film. In other words, it is the prompted, rather than the prompter, plundering the IP.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s why I took notice when I heard a challenge to this orthodoxy from Jason Zada, an Emmy-winning producer who founded Secret Level<\/a>, an \u201cAI-native\u201d production studio that produced the divisive Coca-Cola<\/a> holiday ad last year. Zada believes that the power to keep AI outputs copyright clean lies in the hands of the prompter, meaning Secret Level forbids IP being cited in its text inputs.<\/p>\n

\n\tChatting over Zoom, Zada asked: If you purchased a Stormtrooper costume from a store and filmed Star Wars scenes in your backyard, is the shop to blame for the IP being flouted? Unlikely \u2014 but the difference is that costume stores are not drawing on a vast well of IP against the wishes of content owners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf you really study how AI learns, it\u2019s looking at a bunch of different things. It\u2019s describing them. It\u2019s not copying them,\u201d Zada responds. \u201cThe human brain is actually the dirtiest model out there. We\u2019re constantly absorbing everything that we see, and then we put it down as original thought, and it\u2019s not at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tZada\u2019s position on prompting may not be fashionable in Hollywood, but clients like Coca-Cola are comfortable with his approach. Secret Level\u2019s Coca-Cola holiday ad, featuring generative AI critters, got plenty of hate last year, but Zada is unapologetic: \u201cThere\u2019s a push for \u2018real\u2019 that\u2019s weird to me. It\u2019s like people screaming about still using a horse and carriage as an automobile drives by.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tZada will evangelize about artificial intelligence as part of the Secret Level Academy, an $849 online AI filmmaking masterclass, which gets underway on February 2. Alongside him will be Secret Level\u2019s newest hire, Christina Lee Storm, the former Netflix executive who helped draw up the TV Academy\u2019s responsible AI production standards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThese guidelines emphasize the need to use AI models trained on \u201cethically sourced, properly licensed, and clean data,\u201d which diverges somewhat from Zada\u2019s thinking. Secret Level has produced content using the likes of Google\u2019s Veo, currently the subject of a legal threat from Disney, and Zada says \u201conly a few\u201d clean models exist (he cites Adobe Firefly and Moonvalley). \u201cEven though the models might be dirty, it\u2019s up to the person who\u2019s prompting to be the responsible one. And I really stand by that,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo, is it time for rights holders and campaigners like Johansson to put equal emphasis on the prompters, who misuse AI (even accidentally) to pass off content they don\u2019t own? Maybe. At the very least, evolving thinking around \u201cclean\u201d AI suggests that producers should draw up ethical prompting policies when experimenting with the technology. The debate is far more nuanced than big tech = the bad guys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to\u00a0Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of\u00a0AI\u00a0and showbiz. Rendering examines how\u00a0artificial intelligence\u00a0is disrupting the entertainment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,14011,9346,166935,4114,206067,34086,74],"class_list":["post-435453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-coca-cola","tag-harry-potter","tag-rendering","tag-scarlett-johansson","tag-secret-level","tag-techline","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}