A creator using Runway, Pika and ElevenLabs is equally capable of making either an ad campaign for a beverage brand or a short film they intend to own. On its surface, it presents a fork in the road towards what Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela predicts will be a “Cambrian explosion of creativity, weirdness, new media, and new forms of expression and art” that is “just around the corner.”
If an AI storyteller cannot own their IP, the business model question becomes secondary. Studios and advertising agencies will hire AI-skilled creators to work on existing IP and brands. Their output will be faster and cheaper than traditional production. There will be income for the storytellers, but there will be no path to IP ownership.
The calculus of most AI storytellers is to take the brand deal because it pays now. That choice is easier to understand based on what copyright law requires. The U.S. Copyright Office wrote in 2023 that when authors use AI in the creative process, “what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work’s expression and ‘actually formed’ the traditional elements of authorship.”
