How much can artists make from generative AI? Vendors won't say | TechCrunch
The article highlights the growing conflict between generative AI companies and creative professionals regarding compensation for the copyrighted works used to train these models. While tech vendors argue their data usage falls under fair use, creators are pushing back through legal action and public advocacy, demanding equitable profit-sharing. This dispute centers on whether artists should be paid for their contributions to AI development and, if so, how those payments should be structured to reflect the value of their original intellectual property. Despite several major platforms launching creator funds, the actual financial benefits remain opaque and likely negligible for most contributors. Investigations into compensation schemes by Adobe, Getty Images, and Shutterstock reveal vague formulas and a lack of transparency, with surveys indicating that individual payouts amount to mere cents per image. The absence of clear, standardized metrics makes it difficult for artists to predict earnings, turning these initiatives into uncertain prospects rather than reliable income streams for those reliant on creative work. This situation is critically relevant to open data because it challenges the assumption that freely scraping publicly available data is a sustainable or ethical business model. As the debate intensifies, there is a shifting paradigm toward mandatory licensing and transparency in data sourcing. This underscores the need for clear, accessible data provenance standards and fair compensation frameworks, suggesting that truly open and sustainable AI development may require moving beyond free, unattributed data usage toward structured, consensual data ecosystems.
Source: techcrunch.comPublished on 2023-10-01