Porn or otherwise, I think nearly all the excitement in the AI space from 2024-2030 is going to happen in the courtroom, rather than the computer lab. A computer program that can generate infinite, believable episodes of Show Xyz is going to be made sometime in the future--it's a foregone conclusion, and I'll take that bet any day. The technical challenges on the path to getting there are relatively unexciting.

The question about who gets paid when I buy that program is going to take decades, maybe a lifetime to settle.

If you believe that a computer can and inevitably will create this content, it’s also a foregone conclusion that its origin will be obfuscated and diffuse. I can’t see how an actor working in country X will collect on use of their likeness generated by a computer in country Y. Similarly, if 10,000+ individuals with computers are producing infringing content, I fail to see how anyone could seek recompense with any effectiveness. Additionally, if the content is generated from a computer it would seem relatively simple to alter it just enough to call into doubt the likeness used and make it prohibitively difficult for an individual to claim it is in fact their identity and not a fictional derivative protected by some fair use laws. I’m not a copyright expert and I expect we’ll see attempts at legal battles as you suggest, but I expect they’ll pretty much go nowhere unless the ‘offending’ counterparty is seeking conflict, and the result will be a fundamental undermining of the authority that the current copyright system holds.

Edit: I think the closest approximation of a solution to the compensation/control questions re digital content in an age of on-demand generative AI will involve content creators of all stripes self-hosting and self-publishing to make it easy for fans to directly patronize. Trying to stop clones is a fool’s errand.

> One day (famous actor) will die. Later, they will headline a movie that people rave about.

Yep. This is one of the many things that I detest about how this technology will inevitably be used.

I have a problem with it at a deep level. It appears that the things about these technologies that excite people the most are those things that are direct attacks on reality. It's bad enough that large segments of society is already in a place where truth doesn't matter. Now comes tools to make it possible that reality itself doesn't matter anymore.