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The Old Model Is Finished. What Replaces It?

The entertainment industry has operated on a linear logic for decades. You write the story. You make the film. You license the merchandise. You build the theme park. Each stage follows the last, and at every step, access is controlled by a small number of powerful institutions with large amounts of capital. That model is not under pressure but is it beginning to fail?

I spoke recently with Samantha Tauber, founder of VNCCII, a science futures franchise she is building entirely outside the traditional studio system. She described is not only an experiment. It is a working model, one that uses human creativity as the foundation and generative AI as the engine that scales it. The conversation left me thinking carefully about what this means, not just for the creative industries, but for any sector where intellectual property, community and technology intersect.

 

Why Seed IP Changes Everything

Samantha drew a distinction early in our conversation that I found genuinely clarifying. She separates what she calls seed IP from derivative IP. The seed IP is the original, human-created work. In her case, it is the first book of a trilogy she wrote entirely without AI assistance. It establishes the characters, the values, the internal logic and the creative base of her story universe. She describes it as the lore of the world.


The derivative IP is everything built around that foundation. Traditionally, derivative work has been produced by human writers, directors and studios through spin-offs, adaptations and sequels. Samantha is doing things differently by treating generative AI as a legitimate producer of derivative content, capable of creating episodic stories, localising narratives for different cultural markets, developing secondary characters and producing low-budget animation and games, all within the boundaries of the original human-created lore.

This separation matters enormously. The anxiety in the creative industries about AI is often framed as a binary: either AI replaces human creativity or it does not. Samantha's model rejects that framing entirely. Human originality establishes the intention, the purpose and the integrity. AI accelerates the scale at which that intention can reach audiences. The two serve entirely different functions, and neither undermines the other if the distinction is made explicit and maintained.

[LINK: AI and human collaboration in the workplace]


The Community Is No Longer Just the Audience

The second idea from our conversation Samantha calls the dynamic mythos engine. It is a working title for the four-stage model she is building at VNCCII. The first stage is the seed human IP. The second is the AI derivative content layer. The third is a story platform where audiences explore the evolving world. The fourth is the licensing and revenue architecture.

What makes the third stage novel is that the community of fans and co-creators is not passive. Samantha's vision is for them to contribute to the story itself, within the guardrails of the original lore, and to earn from their contributions. She points to precedents already forming: the OpenAI licensing deal with Disney in December 2024, which allows communities to create within defined creative parameters; and the musician Grimes, who licensed her own voice clone to her community through a project called Elf.Tech, with the resulting music distributed on Spotify.

These are early examples, but they signal something significant. The relationship between a creative work and its audience is changing from consumption to participation. For leaders in media, publishing, gaming and adjacent sectors, this is not a peripheral trend. It is a structural shift in how intellectual property generates value over time.


[LINK: AI in advertising and the future of creative content] Link to Alex Dalman’s episode https://open.spotify.com/episode/7k7LbL1coTDgO27qzTsGwc?si=M8ren5YORne5DCm6nK9gpw


What This Means for Organisations

The implications of this model extend well beyond the creative industries. Any organisation that holds intellectual property, whether a brand, a body of research, a curriculum or a library of creative assets, now has to think differently about how that IP is used, who can use it and how value flows from its use.


Three practical questions follow directly from this conversation.

The first is about foundation. What is your seed IP? What is the human-created, human-curated core of your work that defines its integrity and its purpose? This cannot be delegated to AI. It requires a clear human decision about what your organisation stands for and what its creative or intellectual output is actually for.


The second is about architecture. Once that foundation is established, how are you building the derivative layer around it? Generative AI can accelerate production, localise content and personalise experiences at a scale that few, if any, human teams can match. But it requires explicit governance: boundaries about what the AI can and cannot do with your IP, and transparency with your audience about when AI has been used.


The third is about community. Samantha described fans as people who hold not just cultural equity but potentially monetisation equity in a creative project. This principle applies more broadly. The communities around your brand, your products or your services are not just consumers. With the right architecture, they become contributors, co-creators and advocates. AI makes it feasible to involve them at scale in ways that were not possible before.


Samantha is also completely open with her audience about what she creates with AI and what she does not. Her music is entirely human-made. Her novel was written without AI assistance. When she uses generative AI tools to produce visual content featuring her VNCCII character, she says so clearly. This transparency is not just an ethical stance. It is a practical one. In an environment where audiences are becoming more attuned to the difference between human and AI-generated work, honesty about the process builds a form of trust that is genuinely difficult to replicate.


The Legacy We Choose to Leave

Samantha's novel is being laser-etched onto nano nickel-gold material and sent to the lunar surface aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later this year, as part of the first Galactic Library Preservation for Humanity. It is a remarkable act of creative commitment, and she offered a line in our conversation that I think deserves to be heard widely.


"Civilisation does not just inherit our spreadsheets. It inherits our values."

In a period when AI can produce content, simulate creativity and generate IP at extraordinary speed, the question of what human creativity is actually for becomes more urgent, not less. What we choose to make, why we choose to make it, and how transparently we account for the process: these are the decisions that will define the creative and cultural legacy of this moment.


As AI lowers every technical barrier to production, the lasting value of human creative work will not be determined by what tools were used. It will be determined by the intention behind it.


Listen to the full conversation with Samantha Tauber on The AI Adoption Podcast.

 
 
 

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