By Douglas McGinness, founder and director of the AI creative studio Animated Company. His work has received a D&AD Wooden Pencil award and has screened at the Festival de Cannes. Clients include Apple, Nike, Google, Epic Games, BBC, Paramount, and more.
AI has evolved so rapidly throughout the last five years that we’ve reached the stage where it’s almost ubiquitous, and anyone can use it to make almost anything. For the creative industries, this has been a concerning development, devaluing skills that were once venerated, from scriptwriting to design and animation. Entire short films, which once would have required months of work from dedicated professionals, can now be generated in minutes, at a fraction of the cost. From the outside, this seems to signal the end of creative value, but as AI saturates the market with content, it’s intellectual property (IP) that will continue to drive revenue and relevance across the industry, not production.
The value of differentiation
The difficulty with this AI overload is that when content is unlimited, attention becomes the thing that matters. People only have so much time and patience to give, and they don’t want to waste it on content that doesn’t deliver personal value and emotional resonance. And that’s where IP becomes so important. Because it does just deliver content, but the comfort of familiarity; a world, a character, a story, or a history that means something to the viewer, and they can hold on to that.
For decades, IP was primarily about control; studios controlled tools, talent, capital, and distribution. None of that is now relevant. With anyone capable of executing content, what matters more is meaning. While AI can generate quality content, it can’t produce the shared cultural memories associated with a franchise. That emotional continuity belongs to IP; it’s the cognitive shortcut that signals to an audience that something is worth their attention.
How studios are adapting to the shift
Studios are already entirely aware of the emotional potential of IP – that’s why we’re seeing endless iterations of the same characters and stories, from Harry Potter to Marvel. But they’re not ignoring AI either; they’re using it to build upon IP’s potential, dramatically lowering the cost of franchise exploration: alternate timelines, spin-offs, adaptations, localisation, format shifts. IP that once supported a single release can now support an entire ecosystem of iterations, making “known but underdeveloped” properties suddenly attractive again because they have become expandable, and are capable of carrying their existing fan base along with them on that expansion journey.
AI isn’t competing with IP; it’s leveraging it.
How AI expands IP value
IP’s growing value doesn’t just rest with storytelling and execution; it has operational impact too. It improves detection of unauthorised use, automates rights management, and identifies licensing opportunities that would previously have been missed. Making the management of complex IP portfolios cheaper, faster, and more precise.
On the creative side, AI enables dramatic IP expansion. Instead of a single high-stakes release every few years, IP can proliferate, expanding out beyond long form to short form, interactive, social, immersive, ensuring that it remains culturally present and continuously available, meeting audiences where they are and where they want it. Whether that’s TikTok, Xbox, or an IMAX cinema screen. But importantly, it can do this while remaining coherent and without fragmenting the core identity of the work.
There are still risks that we shouldn’t be ignoring
While AI is proving undeniably useful, it also raises issues that may be problematic. With AI creations, both authorship and ownership remain ambiguous, especially when AI systems are trained on vast datasets of existing work. As yet, there is very little legal clarity in this area, so while creative capability is rapidly expanding, endless questions remain about the legalities.
And even when that is dealt with, there remains the risk of imitation. The beauty of AI is that it expedites workflows through imitation and reproduction, but that also makes it incredibly easy for others to copy the surface of a style. So, how can IP holders properly define what actually makes their work distinctive? And that’s where the pressure for specificity and defensibility comes in.
Perhaps least importantly, but still worth noting, is the problem of knowing when enough is enough. When there are few time or budgetary constraints on content production, studios have to know when to stop force-feeding their audience. When IP is over-produced, originality is exhausted along with audience appetite. And everything that made that IP so valuable is lost.
What matters now
As AI moves from novelty to tool, studios will need to start viewing IP as something that evolves, rather than as something that is simply owned. That means prioritising the value of the narrative over the quantity of the output. Consumers want characters and worlds that continue to deliver without losing what made them special. For that, studios need to retain judgement, taste, and emotional truth while using AI to explore the potential of what’s possible.
Because, while anyone can make content, you need perspective to make it work. And that’s the value of IP.
