AI featured prominently at the inaugural Jupiter Festival Miami, a four-day gathering held Oct. 6-9 at the Miami Beach Convention Center that brought together professionals from media, entertainment and sports. AI appeared in the titles or descriptions of 13 sessions, and its growing influence was part of the conversation in many others.
With creators, image consultants, legal experts, marketers and branding specialists in attendance, much of the discussion centered on name, image and likeness rights, particularly how AI is complicating ownership, control and copyright protections in an increasingly digital world.
“Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the entire relationship between content, performance, and ingenuity in ways that we have never seen before…” said Anthony DeLima, co-founder and CEO of SentientX, during his presentation. His company developed the Human Identity Bank, a platform designed to protect individuals against unauthorized use of their identities. “We are very concerned with protecting their name, image and likeness.”
The Human Identity Bank allows individuals to register and verify identifying characteristics, including their faces, voices and likenesses. According to the company, the platform also monitors for potential misuse, including AI-generated impersonations, and supports efforts to remove unauthorized content and manage licensing rights.
DeLima urged creators and public figures to act before their identities are exploited. “Do not wait for something to happen to clean it up, because you’ll be too late.”
The prominence of AI at the festival was hardly accidental. Organizers recognized early in the planning process that the technology would be central to discussions about the future of content.
“Twelve months ago it was a PowerPoint presentation,” said Eric Markgraf, a co-founder of Jupiter Festival Miami, referring to the event’s beginnings. “AI came up immediately, it is here to stay. How do you navigate the future without it, because it is already a big part of these areas,” he said in an interview with Techstrong.
“Look, we still need people coming up with ideas, but obviously AI works in ways to get things done faster. It will be very interesting to see how AI continues to work within television, movies, commercials, advertising, marketing.”
That relationship between human creativity and machine efficiency surfaced repeatedly throughout the festival. Sessions explored how AI is transforming content production, audience discovery, distribution and the ways creators earn money from their work.
“Creators generate fans, or fandom, and the machine looks into that, understands that fandom, and that is the dichotomy between fandom and AI,” said Shaun Newsum, CEO of Culture Genesis, a media technology company that uses AI to help digital content creators make money from their videos while helping advertisers reach specific audiences. The company operates a network of more than 200 YouTube channels, reaching an estimated 43 million U.S. households monthly. Its network includes prominent creators such as Kai Cenat and iShowSpeed.
Newsum said AI’s biggest benefit for many content creators is that it frees them from production tasks, allowing them to focus on their craft.
One discussion, “The Visibility Wars: Winning Shelf Space Inside AI,” examined how traditional internet searches are giving way to AI-generated recommendations. Rather than scrolling through websites, consumers increasingly ask AI what to buy, watch or trust, creating new challenges for brands competing to appear in those answers.
Another session, “Lost in the Feed: Audience Discovery in the Age of AI,” explored how algorithms can bury compelling content, regardless of its quality. Marketing specialists also examined how AI can identify potential customers, personalize advertising and strengthen relationships between brands and consumers.
The implications extended into sports, where AI is helping organizations better understand fans, personalize engagement and develop revenue streams beyond traditional broadcasting rights. Discussions also considered how athletes and creators are building their own media businesses, challenging established models of sports ownership and distribution.
Legal experts, meanwhile, examined how AI is rewriting creative contracts. Agreements increasingly must address whether a person’s likeness can be digitally replicated, whether copyrighted material can be used to train AI models and who owns or profits from AI-generated works.
Other sessions considered the movement from companies using AI for individual tasks to integrating it throughout their operations. Such a shift could reshape talent management, customer service and production while raising questions about preserving human judgment and creativity.
The festival also explored the consequences of a seemingly limitless supply of content. As AI makes producing images, videos and other media faster and less expensive, creators face growing competition for audience attention, while questions about authenticity and the value of original work become increasingly urgent.
