Motion Capture Is the Business Model for AI Storytelling
Pure AI output has no copyright protection. Human performance does.
For Hollywood’s anti-AI activists, Runway’s pivot away from entertainment and toward world-building seems like a win. If AI platforms cannot protect the content they produce—as Lionsgate discovered with Runway—the content will not get produced.
But longer form stories are emerging from aspiring AI storytellers using Seedance, Veo 3 and other AI platforms. The key legal question for generative AI content is what constitutes “human” authorship. The thorny question for the most ambitious of these new talented storytellers is, how will they monetize their creations if they do not own them?
There is an existing workflow in both film and generative AI that meets both conditions: Motion capture, or “the process of recording high-resolution movement of objects or people into a computer system”. One creator recently described it as “the Avatar workflow”—a nod to James Cameron’s five-movie “Avatar” saga.
A blockbuster production process may be the solution for IP-driven business models in AI storytelling. It is certainly a foundation upon which creators can build IP. Two creators—Kavan Cardoza aka “Kavan the Kid” and Josh Wallace Kerrigan aka “Neural Viz”—have gained traction with this model. The key detail is that motion capture enables creators to build original IP from their own likeness.
The possibilities seem endless. The question is whether they scale beyond a few talented creators.
