Not IP Versus AI, But IP For AI

TLDR: How AI unlocks new mediums and markets for IP

April 03, 2026

Theme

Creative industries are sorting into two camps on AI, and the fault line is usually described as ethical – artists who oppose it versus technologists who embrace it. However, the difference between these stances is almost entirely structural.

Netflix is reportedly paying up to $600 million for InterPositive, Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking tools startup, which is built on the premise that a filmmaker's existing production assets can train a model that then extends their creative control in post. That is a bet that AI, when built around a creator's own work, creates rather than extracts value.

Signal

Most creative IP was built for a world where copying required effort and resemblance required intent. AI changes both assumptions. Recently, Higgsfield launched a similarity-scoring tool that flags AI-generated content for resemblance to celebrity likenesses, characters, and cinematic signatures. Meanwhile WGA seeks payment for AI training on on writers’ scripts. Both are acknowledgments that the gap between generation and infringement has narrowed enough to necessitate new ways to track and monetize IP.

The InterPositive model points to one version of a solution: a filmmaker’s dailies become the training data for a model that serves their own creative vision. The IP doesn’t get consumed, but rather, extended. That is a fundamentally different relationship between creative work and AI than the one that has driven most of the industry’s anxiety.

The creators who figure this out first will be the ones who upgrade their IP to integrate AI, making it legible, licensable, and participatory in the value it generates. Those opposed to AI are mostly opposed to a specific condition: extraction without recognition or compensation. This is territory we’ve charted before with the advent of new mediums such as cinema, television, streaming, and mobile. Each unlocked new distribution and markets for IP that existing frameworks weren't built to handle.

Summit

Before there was code, before there was canvas, there was scent — the original (invisible) art. A single fragrance can arouse desires, settle nerves, revive a precious memory, or elevate a task to a ritual. A profoundly human art that has uplifted lives since the dawn of civilization is now meeting the most disruptive technological moment in history. 

Fragrance Creators Association is joining the AI & Creativity Summit in New York as a sponsor, and their President & CEO Farah Ahmed is taking our stage.

A biochemist, attorney, and industry strategist, Farah built her career at the edge of what's possible and what's permissible, leading a collective of the world's most inventive companies, shaping policy in Washington to accelerate innovation, and advising international trade stakeholders on how to expand fragrance markets across a shifting geoeconomic landscape. She runs the organization that gives a multibillion-dollar fragrance industry its voice, and she's coming to our stage with a provocation: what happens when humanity's most sensory art form collides with its most powerful new tool?

Fragrance Creators Association represents the scent industry at the intersection of art, science, and human experience, championing an industry transforming chemistry into identity and culture.

Pulse

We hope to see you in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI and Creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at [email protected].

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx