The Signal: "The Ghost's Apprentice" Tests Disney's New AI Boundaries

The Medium identifies essential signals on how technology is shaping the business of culture, and how the marketplace is evolving in response.

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[Author’s Note: I attended the On_Discourse AI Summit yesterday. It was a terrific day of learning and networking, with some fascinating demos of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tech. Participants were generally bullish about AI’s future, and openly debated what it means to be a creative, a manager, a founder… and many other aspects of being human in this moment.

I interviewed several attendees about recent market signals that forced them to rethink a key business assumption. I will post the short audio clips here over the next few weeks.

Expect more consistent market “signals” from this Substack, both audio and text.

Also, last weekend I wrote my next Medium Shift column for The Information based on four recent interviews with AI “builders”. Standard subscribers to The Medium will receive posts with video clips organized by common themes. PARQOR Platinum subscribers will receive analysis connecting these interviews into a cohesive picture of the future.]

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The Signal

Two conflicting signals have emerged for those wondering whether Disney’s famous walled garden of intellectual property will be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).

Last month, “Star Wars - The Ghost's Apprentice (Fan Film)” appeared on YouTube. It was made by a self-described “AI Filmmaker” and AI artist Kavan Cardoza, known professionally as Kavan the Kid. It was built using Google Veo2, Midjourney and Runway. It required only two weeks to produce and has garnered over 300,000 views—nearly 6x the views of his previous video (a Samurai film) from January.

The story features a young Jedi trained in isolation by his uncle, and his uncle’s ghost. It uses none of the beloved characters, planets or worlds of Star Wars.

Notably, there has been no takedown order from Disney (and, an AI-generated YouTube short involving Batman received a takedown notice from Warner Bros. Discovery but is now back up). That seems at odds with Disney CEO Robert Iger’s recent comments to investors at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting last week.

Disney is embracing AI, “perhaps the most powerful technology that our company has ever seen”. However, it is also instituting three precautionary measures:

“One, that our IP is being protected. That’s incredibly important. Second, that our creators are being respected, and last, that our customers are being considered and valued, particularly as this technology emerges rapidly.”

Given those measures, why hasn’t Disney issued a takedown notice for yet?

Why It Matters

Piracy presents a business dilemma for IP holders. AI Filmmaker and entrepreneur Tom Paton—whom I interviewed back in November— envisions a near future of “a rogue outfit” in Taiwan with 100 people using AI tools to generate scripts for very well-known IP. They then convert those scripts into hundreds of thousands of videos and flood the internet.