Mickey Mouse would perhaps be the most revealing person to ask about what AI holds in store for 2024. The copyright to the cartoon rodent’s first movie, Steamboat Willie, expired on 1 January and immediately the internet began taking the Mickey: cobbled-together games and videos began to proliferate, worthless NFTs were hastily created. The most attention points went to a junk horror film, the entire premise of which – “the mouse is out” – seems to be that it is now possible to cash in on the expiration of Disney’s intellectual property.
A growing body of evidence suggests such rehashing is happening at a much bigger scale, whether copyright protections exist or not. Large language models (LLMs) promise a future of endlessly derivative, mechanically reprocessed culture, in which every creative idea is automatically remixed into a soup of algorithmic content opportunities.
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