creative-economy

The Substitute Input: Private Equity and AI in Creative Production
Private equity firms are buying music catalogs the same way they buy anything that throws off cash flow. Across the page, an AI agent’s byline appears beneath a story where no writer signed on. Both moves answer the same question in the same way: who gets paid when cultural output no longer requires paying creators?…

The Commons Was Never Free
The latest filings in the New York Times matter against OpenAI and Microsoft don’t argue about text anymore. They invoke culture. They invoke sports. They invoke the full width of what human beings make when they think nobody is keeping score, which is a much larger category than a newspaper archive and a very different…