Nothing wants your money, AWS wants your trust, and Spotify wants your data

Ready to ship AI that works? Start building at mongodp.com/build. Hello, and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, December 5. I had to check on that one. I'm Kirsten Koroszek, transportation editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined by Anthony and Sean O'Kane. I wanna throw it to you, Anthony, because I feel like you'll have something to say about James Cameron and his views on generative AI. Yeah. I was excited to talk about this because, actually, an old colleague of mine described this as an extremely Anthony coded story. You know, there's a new Avatar movie coming out later this month. James Cameron is starting to do PR for that. He did a segment with CBS Sunday morning. And one of the things he seems to be sort of at pains to emphasize is the idea that, obviously, we think of the Avatar movies as super kind of tech heavy, computer generated, but he really wants you to understand this is not generative AI. He said generative AI is horrifying and that the technology they use, which is called performance capture, motion capture, he sees that as really the the opposite of generative AI because it's still about a real actor giving a real performance even though there are sort of digital artists in between who then translated that into a character that I think, to him, that's very distinct. And I think that's, you know, both an interesting point and also indicative of how just in general, people in Hollywood are, like, feel this need to kinda draw a line in the sand and say, we are not doing that. But I was well informed by members of the public town square that is the social media site x that, Hollywood is cooked, that you can create your own Hollywood blockbuster. I don't know if any of you have seen this, but this sort of pushback on generative AI and whether they can take, like, actors' jobs. I've seen folks, like, use generative AI and pretend that they're actors and see how they, like, basically fail at being an actor, and I think we're gonna keep seeing that. What's interesting to me is this idea that every studio is coming out and saying, hey. We're not doing generative AI and, like, educating people on what is, like, stop motion and what is gen AI. I will say I think it's gonna continue to be an issue, especially as, you know, states with a lot of entertainment focus, like California, for instance. There are state regulations popping up in and around AI, and it'll be curious to see also how, like, labor unions weigh in on this. There have been efforts at the federal level to tuck in essentially, like, a preemption law, which would restrict states from regulating AI into the defense bill, but that actually this week just failed. So I expect a continuation of sort of patchwork …