Air gap. If you don’t want content to be used without your permission, it never leaves your computer. This is the only protection that works.
If you want others to see your content, however, you have to accept some degree of trade off with it being misappropriated. Blatant cases can be addressed the same as they always were, but a model overfitting to your original work poses an interesting question for which I’m not aware of any legal precedents having been set yet.
Big IP holders will go nuclear on IP licensing to an extent we've never seen before.
Right now, there are thousands of images and videos of Star Wars, Pokemon, Superman, Sonic, etc. being posted across social media. All it takes is for the biggest IP conglomerates to turn into linear tv and sports networks of the past and treat social media like cable.
Disney: "Gee {Google,Meta,Reddit,TikTok}, we see you have a lot of Star Wars and Marvel content. We think that's a violation of our rights. If you want your users to continue to be able to post our media, you need to pay us $5B/yr."
I would not be surprised if this happens now that every user on the internet can soon create high-fidelity content.
This could be a new $20-30B/yr business for Disney. Nintendo, WBD, and lots of other giant IP holders could easily follow suit.
The next step is to take this beyond AI generations and to license rights to characters and IP on social media directly.
The next salvo will be where YouTube has to take down all major IP-related content if they don't pay a licensing fee. Regardless of how it was created. Movie reviews, fan animations, video game let's plays.
I've got a strong feeling that day is coming soon.
Air gap. If you don’t want content to be used without your permission, it never leaves your computer. This is the only protection that works.
If you want others to see your content, however, you have to accept some degree of trade off with it being misappropriated. Blatant cases can be addressed the same as they always were, but a model overfitting to your original work poses an interesting question for which I’m not aware of any legal precedents having been set yet.