Copied on the Spot The power and ubiquity of generative AI has had people fearing for their livelihoods — especially artists, who worry that their work will be vulnerable to mass plagiarism by the AIs that are being “trained” on their art. And, as The Wall Street Journal reports, even Hollywood is beginning to feel the heat. Phil Wiser, technology chief at Paramount Global, a media conglomerate and one of the largest film studios and distributors in the world, recently rang the alarm bells during a presentation with company executives. In his presentation, Wise used the popular AI image generator DALL-E to spit out some of Paramount’s most iconic characters. First, he had it generate SpongeBob on the fly. Then, Wiser had DALL-E generate an image of Optimus Prime from “Transformers” standing in the studio’s lot. “This woke everyone up,” he told WSJ. Credit Where It’s Due Wiser makes a fair point. The profitability of the entertainment business rides on intellectual property ownership, as the WSJ notes. But if cheap, easy-to-use AI enables practically anyone to create images that are directly ripped from existing art or iconic characters, who gets the credit — and the money? That’s a question the Writers Guild of America is reportedly grappling with when it comes to screenplays. “One of the biggest risks here is that these engines can generate our intellectual property in new ways, and that is out in the hands of the public,” Wiser told the WSJ. It’ll take some big court…Hollywood Panicking Over the Rise of Generative AI