Tectonic Shifts in IP

Theme

At a CNN and Variety town hall, Matthew McConaughey told students to prepare for the next wave of AI adoption by owning their voice, likeness, and intellectual property. He pointed to his recent decision to trademark his “Dazed and Confused” catchphrase as a practical safeguard in a world where actors can be synthetically projected into private events, branded experiences, or entirely new works. The premise was clear: AI will be able to replicate you. The leverage will lie in whether it has to ask.

Signal

This moment crystallizes a broader structural shift we have been tracking: the tectonic realignment of IP as a defense mechanism to IP as infrastructure.

In 2024, studios sued AI platforms for copyright infringement. By late 2025, many were signing licensing deals and taking equity stakes in the same companies. Music catalogs, character universes, and brand archives are no longer valuable solely as content to distribute. They function as proprietary training data, stylistic constraints, and controlled inputs into generative systems. McConaughey’s trademark move is the individual version of that industry-wide pivot – formalize ownership so participation can be negotiated, priced, and enforced at the model level.

This shift extends beyond entertainment giants. Any company with a recognizable archive can now train models on its own corpus. The competitive edge moves from distribution scale to rights architecture and data governance. As generative systems improve, IP holders either integrate as licensed infrastructure within the AI stack or risk watching value accrue towards other material. The era of “stop AI” is closing. The era of “design the terms of inclusion” is underway.

Summit

We’re delighted to welcome Epidemic Sound as a sponsor of our upcoming AI & Creativity Summit in New York.

Music is often the difference between content that lands and content that disappears.

Epidemic Sound is a strategic music partner, offering a meticulously curated catalog of tracks from real artists to bring creative visions to life. They empower the world's leading brands, professional creators and agencies to tell more powerful stories with music and next gen soundtracking tools, simplifying the entire process from discovery to final cut.

On stage in New York, Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, former editor-in-chief of WIRED, and host of The Most Interesting Thing in AI, joins the speaker lineup.

Pulse

• Community Member Matt Zien released a film: Another balmy night in a boring dystopia. Three 'escourtesans' set out to get the bag of a lifetime. But in the Degen Kingdom, nothing's as it seems.

• Hollywood's AI clash with China: Axios covers how Hollywood might be the first casualty of China's unrelenting efforts to catch the U.S. in AI.

• Physical AI Could Be a Trillion Dollar Market by 2035: Bloomberg breaks down how a new report from Barclays projects that in the next decade physical AI could grow to be a trillion-dollar market, with AVs leading the way.

• Google promises ‘more focused deals’ with news publishers as FT joins AI pilot: Press Gazette reports on Google leading 'active discussions' with publishers, leading to product changes.

We hope to see you in NYC 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.

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