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It is an audacious bid. Through his hedge fund Pershing Square, Bill Ackman has offered $64 billion for Universal Music, one of the largest music conglomerates in the world and a producer for artists including Taylor Swift.
It is a complex deal involving both cash and shares and would move the company's listing from Amsterdam to New York.
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It is far from the only recent media megadeal. After a battle with Netflix, Paramount Skydance, which is controlled and financed by the Ellison family, has agreed to pay more than $100 billion for Warner Bros, the studio that controls a huge library of films, along with news channel CNN and sports broadcaster TNT. It still needs regulatory approval in the markets where it operates, but the deal is agreed, and there is little to stop it from happening now.
Investors are betting against AI slopThere is a common theme to both major bids. Huge sums of money are being wagered on the proposition that the arts will still be created and controlled by humans. That goes against the hype in the rest of the market.
We have read huge amounts about the rise of AI and the vast sums being poured into the software and data centres that will power super-smart chatbots. The leading companies in the sector, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, may well be worth more than $1 trillion if they list their shares later this year, while established giants such as Google, Meta and Elon Musk's X have been pouring fortunes into developing their own systems.
The creative industries are meant to be right in the firing line to be replaced by AI. The bots are good at generating music tracks that can be surprisingly popular. There have been plenty of AI-generated songs that have topped the streaming charts, and the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini offer music-generating tools. It is not hard to choose a genre, come up with a theme, and then upload a track onto Spotify or Google Music. It can be very lucrative.
Likewise, AI actors can replace real ones, and the same is true of scriptwriters, technicians and directors. Indeed, Netflix last month paid $600 million for InterPositive, an AI start-up developing post-production tools for the film industry, backed by the actor Ben Affleck. There are already reports of AI helping with scripts, and it may not be long before the bots are up on the big screen.
So why would anyone in their right mind want to pay tens of billions for a film studio or a music label? After all, there is not much value in a studio if films can be created by anyone with a laptop and a subscription to ChatGPT or Claude AI.
Conventional wisdom says the world will soon be flooded with AI slop – films of every conceivable genre, written for you, directed in any style you choose, and acted by AI-generated bots, or else by digitally recreated megastars from the past. Every taste will be catered to, and it may not be long before you can choose from a range of plot twists or endings depending on your personal taste. Traditional films will be finished.
Likewise, the streaming apps will also soon be flooded with AI slop – Taylor Swift knockoffs, along with tracks from every possible musical style, from classical to jazz to soul. We will all be able to create our own personal track-lists, made up of a mash-up of styles, singers and musicians precisely tailored to our own tastes or mood.
Taylor Swift need not worry about the bots
(Image credit: Kevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
AI slop cannot create anything newWell, perhaps. Yet the billionaire bidders for Warner and Universal are clearly on to something. In the end, human creativity will survive. The chatbots can recreate plots or tunes that already exist, study the libraries and rustle up a reasonable facsimile. But they can't create anything new; they don't have personality, they don't have any insight into our feelings, and they are never going to be able to make us laugh, cry or dance.
The chatbots might change the way industries function, but they are unlikely to destroy them. Investors are pouring huge sums of money into AI start-ups, confident that the systems will be able to replace just about any form of human endeavour.
Some of the world's richest people are betting the other way – against the triumph of AI slop. So should ordinary investors.
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