Publishers finally have AI buyers for their content yet zero say in the price
In the early days of generative AI , it seemed as if the labs were so heads-down building large language models that they didn’t think much about the raw material they were using. After all, big data sets like Common Crawl already existed, and trawling the open web was how search engines had worked for decades. Chatbots were arguably just a variation on that idea. Who knew that their method for…
Generative AI labs were so focused on building large language models that they didn't ponder the raw material they were using, which turned out to be highly controversial. Both Microsoft and OpenAI executives in internal documents acknowledged the theft of labor and labeled it as the largest theft in human history. OpenAI's president Greg Brockman and head of ChatGPT Nick Turley acknowledged the value of content, but the market for buying that content in real-time still hasn't materialized.
The Department of Justice intervened in the case, emphasizing the importance of fair use, as it seeks to prevent Chinese competitors from gaining an advantage. Despite some licensing deals, the AI industry has been hesitant to invest in a marketplace for purchasing content due to concerns about commoditization and low prices. Meanwhile, data brokers, or AI middlemen, have established a $1 billion market by scraping and reselling data.
Meta, a major player in the AI world, is both a significant data harvester and a buyer of content for its AI agents. Efforts are underway to redirect the market for inference, which produces AI answers about real-time content, back to publishers through payment rails for "good" bots.
Written by urgent.news from Fast Company's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
