Your Novel, Your Movie, Your Show: How AI Is Going to Change Business in 1, 5, and 10 Years

Imagine it's Sunday night. Your young daughter doesn't want to go to sleep and asks you for a story where she and the family dog save a town from taco-eating dragons. Today, you tell your phone what you want, and by the time she brushes her teeth, you already have a little illustrated book featuring her face, the dog, and the dragons.

The question this text explores is what happens to business when telling a story stops being expensive. To answer it, it helps to look back, because this isn't the first time copying something suddenly became dirt cheap. And each time, someone very important shouted that it was the end of the world.

The Shoe-Shine Boy Who Saved Dickens

In early 1836, a young man named Charles Dickens began publishing a novel in cheap monthly installments, printed on plain paper for the common folk. It was called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, and at first, it was a flop: the early issues barely sold around four hundred copies.

Then, in the fourth installment, Sam Weller showed up—a London neighborhood bootblack with a lightning-fast tongue. People saw themselves in him. Sales skyrocketed to some forty thousand copies per issue. What's interesting for our story is what happened around it. Before the novel even finished, there were already pirated theater versions, imitators writing unauthorized sequels (one married off Mr. Pickwick, another sent him to India), and an avalanche of cigars, playing cards, and trading cards bearing his name. A few years later, when Dickens was publishing another serial novel, readers flooded his mailbox with letters begging him not to kill off little Nell.

Look at what we have here, nearly two centuries before AI: fans who wanted to change the ending, folks remixing an author's world without asking permission, and a massive merchandise business built around a character. And a detail worth its weight in gold: toward the end of his life, Dickens made more money reading live in packed theaters than he did from his books. The installments could be copied. Dickens in the flesh, not so much.

The King of Marches vs. the Player Piano

At the turn of the last century, the latest novelty was the player piano, a piano that played all by itself by reading a perforated paper roll. Roll factories sold composers' music without paying them a dime. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the manufacturers: a roll of paper with holes in it, the Court said, is not a copy of the sheet music.

John Philip Sousa, the king of military marches, went to Congress to complain. He argued that these talking machines were going to ruin the artistic development of music and that human vocal cords were going to evolve out of existence, much like the human tail after coming down from the trees. That didn't happen. Something more boring and far more important happened instead: in 1909, Congress changed the law and created a compulsory license that forced users to pay the composer a small fee for every mechanical copy. The fight didn't end with a ban. It ended with a cash register.

The Boston Strangler and the Store That Became a Museum

Let's jump to 1982. Jack Valenti, the grand representative of Hollywood studios, sat before a congressional committee and dropped one of the most famous lines in movie history: that the VCR was to the movie producer what the Boston Strangler was to a single woman at home. The studios sued Sony over its Betamax, and in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled by a single vote that recording TV at home was legal. Shortly after, cassette movies were already pulling in more cash than box office ticket sales. The supposed assassin turned out to be Hollywood's best customer.

And then came history's revenge. In the year 2000, two guys from a tiny startup that mailed DVDs by postal mail, called Netflix, went to pitch their company to Blockbuster for about fifty million dollars. According to those in the room, the folks at Blockbuster nearly laughed them out of the building. (Blockbuster's former CEO claims the offer was more of an offhand remark, and it's only fair to mention that.) Blockbuster ended up going bankrupt. Its last store on Earth, in Bend, Oregon, became a tourist attraction: people travel just to take selfies outside.

One more, real quick. In 1975, a Kodak engineer invented the first portable digital camera, the size of a toaster, and Kodak kept it off the market, partly out of fear that it would cannibalize its film roll sales. In 1997, an entrepreneur named Philippe Kahn hooked a camera up to his cell phone and instantly transmitted a photo of his newborn daughter. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. They invented the future and left it sitting in a drawer.

If you string these stories together, a three-step pattern emerges, almost like a cooking recipe. First, panic. Next, a deal that turns the threat into royalties. And finally, value packs up and moves to what cannot be copied: the person, the live moment, the trust.

What Already Exists Today, in October 2026

None of this is science fiction. Google features a tool in its Gemini app that builds illustrated children's stories from an idea and a few photos, reading them aloud to you. Audible, Amazon's audiobook service, already narrates books using synthetic voices and translates them into other languages for publishers, and at this month's Frankfurt Book Fair, its head of content stated the goal is for every book to become an audiobook in every language. Amazon is also testing a service that translates e-books for independent authors.

On the video front, an app called Showrunner, made by the company Fable (which Amazon invested in), lets you create animated series, insert yourself as a character, and continue another creator's world—with the original creator getting paid when fans fork over cash to remix their story. Netflix used generative AI to crumble a building in the Argentine series The Eternauta. Google lets its highest-tier subscribers wander through invented worlds in real time, albeit for now only in short bursts and with very basic controls. And there's a computer-generated "actress," Tilly Norwood, who has already announced a feature film and generates just as much curiosity as backlash.

In music, things have already spilled over completely. On Deezer, a French music streaming platform, more than half of the new tracks arriving every day are now made by a machine. Deezer tags them and sets up a toggle button so you can filter them out.

And then come the lawsuits, which make up the panic-and-deal portion of our recipe. Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. have an ongoing lawsuit against Midjourney for generating images of their characters. Anthropic agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars to authors whose books were used to train its AI, and a judge approved the settlement this summer. Record labels sued Suno and Udio, the major AI song factories; Warner has already reached settlements with both, Universal with Udio, and Sony is still fighting. The funniest case, the kind nobody could make up: in December, Disney triumphantly announced an agreement with OpenAI allowing fans to create videos with their characters on Sora, and in March, OpenAI shut Sora down. According to Reuters, Disney's team found out just minutes after walking out of a work meeting with them.

The rules are being written as we speak, too. Since August, Europe has required clear disclosures whenever a video or voice that looks and sounds real is generated by AI. In the United States, the Supreme Court let stand the ruling that a work created entirely by a machine holds no copyright; there has to be a human behind it. Hollywood actors approved a contract this year that only permits the use of synthetic performers if they bring significant added value, and the writers' union secured protections requiring notification whenever their members' work is licensed to train AI. A federal bill to protect your face and voice remains stalled in the U.S. Senate, and Denmark is currently debating one of its own. Cash registers are being installed everywhere, but plenty more still need to be hooked up.

In One Year: What Is All But Certain

I'll start with what feels practically certain, because the pieces are already on the table. By October 2027, audiobooks will no longer be a luxury reserved for bestsellers. That modest little novel that never had a narrator will finally have a voice, likely across multiple languages. Personalized children's bedtime stories are going to turn into a standard birthday gift, much like photo mugs used to be. "Licensed" music platforms—where you can whip up a song cover using the voice of an artist who gave permission and gets paid for it—will already be up and running.

What's also pretty much certain: you'll start seeing "human-made" stamps on books, records, and ads, much like we eventually started seeing "organic" on apples. Big movie premieres will stay the same; one year is simply too short a time to shift habits.

In Five Years: Your Show, Your Ending, Your Accent

Here we enter the territory of reasoned bets rather than certainties. Around 2031, I reckon you'll be able to watch a series where the protagonist has your face if you want them to, where you pick the ending, and where everyone speaks with a local regional accent depending on the day. The building blocks already exist; what's missing is for them to become cheap, consistent, and legal.

This triggers second- and third-order effects, which are the ones that actually drive the money. Think about a campfire. For centuries, stories were a campfire: everyone seated around the same flame, watching the exact same thing. The telenovela that brought the whole country to a halt at night. AI gives each of us a personal flashlight. It illuminates precisely what you want, but by Monday morning, there's nothing left to chat about at the office. My bet is that campfires don't vanish; they simply become scarcer and, therefore, more valuable. The blockbuster premiere we all watch the same weekend will start looking more like a concert or a World Cup final: an event.

Studios will stop acting merely as movie factories and start resembling owners of story theme parks. Their business will be renting out their worlds and characters to fans who want to craft their own adventures, complete with rules and pay-per-use models. Dickens experienced this for free with his imitators; the studios of 2031 are going to charge for it.

Faces and voices will be licensed much the way stock photos are licensed today. An actor will be able to rent out their voice for audiobooks in dozens of languages while they sleep, and there will be lawyers, insurance companies, and agencies dedicated exclusively to monitoring whether anyone is using your mug without permission. That's the side effect almost nobody sees coming: the boom will also belong to the gatekeepers of permissions.

And here comes some brutal honesty. Commercial dubbing and translation, as we know them, won't survive this period. High-end literary translators and prestigious dubbing directors will stick around, but the volume work goes straight to the machine. The same goes for background music, generic stock photos, by-the-book formulaic novels, and mass-produced ads. If your business model relies on churning out work that is correct but completely interchangeable, the clock is already ticking.

A textbook will be able to explain fractions using dinosaurs to a kid who loves them, and using soccer to his sister. And an ad will cease being broadcast to millions, becoming instead an ad just for you, featuring your name. Bookstores that sell only paper bricks are going to have a rough time; those that transform into clubs, cafés, live readings, and spots for well-curated recommendations might thrive better than ever. Libraries, which have always been community living rooms disguised as book warehouses, are staring down a massive opportunity.

In Ten Years: When the Story Talks Back

By 2036, I'm wading into pure intuition, so take it with a grain of salt. I believe the boundary dividing books, movies, and video games will dissolve completely. A story will feel more like a conversation: you ask for something, it replies and remembers where you left off. Game worlds will generate themselves dynamically as you walk through them.

Yet I also believe—and I'm wagering on this with much more confidence—that people will fiercely defend certain things with tooth and nail. They'll want bedtime stories read by Mom's actual voice, not a clone of it. They'll want shared stories that everyone knows by heart so we can reference them at a wedding or a funeral. They'll want flesh-and-blood humans signing off on what we read when it truly matters. And they'll want strict laws ensuring nobody uses a child's face without consent—something bound to result in heavy-duty legislation.

Physical reality is going to climb in price. When any random landscape can be generated right in your living room, actually standing by the ocean, inside a theater, at a live concert, or visiting the last brick-and-mortar specialty shop becomes the ultimate luxury. Tourism, festivals, live theater with sweating actors: all of those win big. It's the exact same lesson of Dickens reading live, all over again.

Fashion is going to bleed into all of this seamlessly. If your character in a show is wearing an incredible jacket, why shouldn't you be able to try it on via your phone and buy it on the spot? Clothing custom-designed for an individual rather than an average size stops being an oddity.

Who Wins and Who Loses, No Sugarcoating

The losers are intermediaries whose sole value was holding the copy: the modern equivalent of the video rental shop. Those selling interchangeable volume content lose out. Losing out, with a heavy heart, are thousands of translators, catalogue voice-over artists, and background musicians, and there's no point pretending otherwise. Shared culture takes a hit, too, and that's worth calling out by name.

The winners are the owners of beloved worlds that people cherish, because fans are going to want to play inside them. Those who license their voices and faces under clear rules come out ahead. Good taste wins: when stories are infinite, someone telling you "this one is actually worth your time" turns into gold. Human storytellers whom people trust win, much the way we trust a doctor or a chef today. And everything experienced live in person wins.

In the end, the machine is going to hand each of us our very own customized story. The scarce commodity—the thing people will genuinely pay for—will be having someone real to share it with.

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References

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What I couldn't verify: the sources I reviewed disagree on the exact year of Blockbuster's bankruptcy (2010 or 2011), so I left it undated; payouts from AI music licensing deals to individual artists are not public; and everything I state about 2027, 2031, and 2036 is forecasting, not established fact.