Greetings from Terminal C at LGA. I'm on my way down to Orlando to do a keynote about AI for the ANA. Ping me if you're around.
In the news: More than 13,000 creatives (including some famous authors, musicians, and actors) signed a that expresses their growing concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models. The one-sentence statement published by Fairly Trained, an advocacy group founded by former Stability AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, reads: "The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted."
Newton-Rex told The Guardian, “There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free.”
Like I said yesterday, this is the fight of the year (maybe the next five years). Fairly Trained's idea is to have a universally enforceable method to prevent creative content from 小蓝视频 used for AI training without permission and compensation.
This might be possible, but anything that was ingested prior to the most recent cutoff date is already part of the collective body of knowledge of every foundational model (no matter the AI company). You can push back and say that there are ways to force this issue, that there are methods where you could extract specific artist's works or fine tune a model to ignore requests to create new work product "inspired" by a particular artist's work. You might even be able to figure out a way to prove that a particular model was trained on something specific and, if it can't be extracted, force some kind of royalty payment.
In practice, where there's a will, there's a way. First, we need to agree that the content (data) required for training should not be free. Then, as we fight the fight, we have to hope that new technologies and synthetic data don't obviate the need for organic, real data.
It's hard to look toward the future through the lens of the present. It's even harder to look through the lens of the past. Here's my question (challenge) to each of you: For AI platforms, what is the right way to compensate content creators for the use of their works? How should AI platforms compensate content creators? There are two areas to consider: 1) training and 2) output. Just reply to this email with your thoughts. -s
P.S. Are you a CMO or AI-focused c-suite exec? If so, please request an invitation to the MMA CMO AI Transformation Summit, which I'm going to host on November 6 in New York. It's going to be an action-packed half-day event featuring short talks, facilitated discussion, and breakouts featuring some of the brightest minds in marketing. Just reply to this email.
ABOUT SHELLY PALMER
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named he covers tech and business for , is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular . He's a , and the creator of the popular, free online course, . Follow or visit .
