David S. Goyer's New AI-Powered Sci-Fi Fantasy World: My Interview
The prolific creator launches Incention, a dizzyingly ambitious platform to upend IP that anyone is invited to join: 'I’m not a proselytizer, I’m not a doomsayer'

Erik Barmack writes every other Tue. for paid subscribers. He recently explained why 2025 will be the year of the full-length AI movie, tested OpenAI’s “Hollywood killer” Sora and assessed how AI storyboarding is transforming pitch meetings.
During the 2023 writers strike, David S. Goyer, the famous writer-director known for the Blade Trilogy, writing the story for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy and creating Apple TV+’s sci-fi series Foundation, wrote this about AI:
The AMPTP’s “compromise” on A.I. is nightmarish. Yes, an A.I. generated script or outline can’t be considered “assigned material” — but make no mistake, the intention is for the studios to produce an A.I. script beforehand that can then be copyrighted once a human being has polished it. Imagine a world where most projects are fed through A.I. first — whether it be Oppenheimer or Foundation or Heartbreaker — and then given to a writer to “humanize.”
Today, less than 18 months later, Goyer, 59, is announcing that he’s launching an AI-powered entertainment platform called Incention, with funding from the A-list investor a16z (Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s shop). The prolific creator is seeding it with an original idea he’s conceived, a sci-fi world he’s dubbed “Emergence” where mysterious objects appear in space and no one knows where they came from.
He’s inviting anyone to create in this world with him — reimagining characters, adding storylines and helping to create Emergence’s canon, with the help of a generative AI “co-pilot” named Atlas. Anyone who contributes will be able to try to profit from their ideas. Check out his launch video here:
Basically, Incention is a way for IP creators and fans to monetize fan fiction by sharing license fees for the output, all while collectively trying to build something more valuable that could become the next big sci-fi franchise.
So what prompted Goyer’s big shift? “Trust me, I know a lot of my shit’s been used to train AI and that I’m not being compensated for it,” Goyer tells me when we chat on Jan. 24. “I’ve done some of the text-to-video stuff, and I can tell. There was one specific case — I won’t name the LLM or the company behind it — where they were like, Yeah, we only train it on public domain stuff.
“I was like, ‘That’s bullshit. I can tell you the movie this is from.’”
But Goyer decided a while ago that he could complain or he could find a seat at the table and figure out “use cases of AI that could be beneficial and not destructive.” Has Reel AI found its muse?
“I’m not a proselytizer, and I’m not a doomsayer,” he continues. “I’m kind of agnostic and I said I want to educate myself and figure out as a creator, how can I use [AI] to sometimes spark ideas but make my life easier.”
Goyer admits that Incention is complex, with its sci-fi world built on top of a blockchain application to keep track of all the contributions and rights and an AI co-pilot as a creative partner. “My wife has no fucking idea what this is,” he admits. “My 15-year-old son gets it.”
Fittingly perhaps, Goyer has teamed with 24-year-old Chase Rosenblatt — a Harvard-Westlake and USC grad whose father and older brother are both serial entrepreneurs — to be his cofounder and Incention’s CEO. So let’s go down the rabbit hole with perhaps the highest-profile AI user in Hollywood — sorry, Brady Corbet: hope you enjoyed holding this title for a week — and his technical cofounder. In this issue, you’ll learn:
Why Goyer believes Hollywood needs a new model for creating and refreshing IP
How AI can be a “council of elders” to guide content creators within a story universe
Why Goyer’s AI is only trained only on material developed for Emergence
How his experiences writing for videogames and VR helped prepare him for developing this collaborative world-building platform
The first projects Goyer hopes to create out of Emergence
Why Hollywood execs should be careful what they wish for with AI
Erik Barmack: How much is Incention informed by what you said during the WGA strike?
David S. Goyer: I still think that some people at studios — not everyone — are thinking, “Let’s use AI to generate scripts and shot lists and get rid of voice actors on all animation.” There are people absolutely thinking that, but there are also a lot of people who don’t have any idea what the fuck they’re talking about.