> nobody is going to care about copyright 15 years from now

This is a perennial prediction. Absent substantiation, it’s hard to take it seriously.

> "MovieGPT, make me an epic fantasy film trilogy that's better than Lord of the Rings, with myself as the hero."

This output isn’t protected. The Lord of the Rings is. We shift to your AI paying when it references the content and move on. Nobody likes licensing fees. Magicking them away isn’t a solution.

> I think this end of intellectual property was predicted when the Constitution was signed.

True. And in 1890 it was predicted that cities would be drowning in horse droppings by 1960. But just because they were wrong then doesn't mean similar predictions today are also wrong.

> We shift to your AI paying when it references the content and move on.

Nope. Because the AI isn't "referencing" LotR, anymore than a human author is when writing a generic fantasy novel about elves and dwarfs. Ideas aren't protected by copyright. Content, characters etc. are. But AI-generated works aren't going to "copy" LotR story or characters. They're going to do what humans have been doing since forever: Draw inspiration from the entire body of human (and AI) creative works in existence. Copyright doesn't prevent that.

> going to do what humans have been doing since forever: Draw inspiration from the entire body of human (and AI) creative works in existence. Copyright doesn't prevent that

It’s not a human and copyright can. Again, simple shift. Could probably slip it into a budget bill.

Like I said, the last gasps. Maybe some legislature is indeed going to try that. It won't matter once AI turns the fabric of society inside out. Laws as we know them will stop meaning anything in practice. Everyone (including legislatures) will be forced to turn most decision making over to AIs, because AIs will be much better at it than humans and not using them means being conquered by those who do.

I feel like Netflix has been doing some form of this for years. Probably not generating entire scripts using AI, but almost certainly manually using algorithms for what to include.

While the output is "entertaining", it's not like you can compare it to actually good films. Netflix will never make something like The Godfather. What they make is like food without nutrition. That's fine, everybody likes sweets once in a while, but it won't keep you alive.

Of course I can't prove Netflix is doing this, but the argument would still hold true for AI generated content.

People will care because disney et al will use their legal power and money power through lobbying to try to make laws blocking these new competitor, the ai generated IP (the movies, books etc).