Your AI and everyone’s copyright

Generative and other AI has a problem: it doesn’t work if it’s not trained first.

Training needs a lot of resources. Current generative AI business models depend on scraping the web for decades, generations and even centuries of human-generated ingenuity.

The biggest corporation in this field, OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, claims it is already delivering revenues in the billions of dollars.

The higher the revenues, the more likely it is that the class action suits for copyright infringement, copyright theft, and plagiarism of human-generated intellectual property will begin to proliferate.

Such legal actions will now appear on all fronts where intellectual property is a value-add for an organisation. This inevitably means uncertainties of an unquantifiable nature, which will pose a threat even for companies as big as OpenAI. And certainly for their more than capable shareholders and supporters, who may very soon begin to realise how much liability they share.

Then again, there are a multitude of startups for whom such increasingly incalculable outcomes may lead them to not enter any markets they might otherwise have wished to benefit from.

Compensify Me, as the proposed Spotify of human-generated intellectual property, suggests we replace the ever-growing legal uncertainties of class action suits in all sectors with a totally new dynamic that allows you, the generative AI organisations of the future, to eliminate all possibility of future legal actions in the field of copyright infringement, copyright theft, plagiarism, and related.

Two aspects to these proposals as follows, in respect of our initial thinking:

1. Payments would be upfront, before training commenced, always.

2. Outcomes, insights, newly generated content and related which emerged from such processes would always carry as many attribution stamps as humans involved in the due payment and reward processes invoked by the Compensify Me system.

Anyone who is in the business of benefitting financially from processes that involve training generative and other AI using human-generated intellectual property, but without due reward, payment or attribution.

Where such individuals or organisations do not fear the consequences of current, near-term and/or long-term ongoing legal actions, we cannot say you are our target client.

But where you do want to deliver AI services and products which all human beings would find easy to embrace, and even love you for, then we can say yes: Compensify Me will be for you.

Equally, if you are a intellectual property owner of human-generated content, then we think you will also be interested.

If you are looking for a seamless and technologically collaborative, always sustainably rewarding way of supporting certain kinds of AI services and products in their obvious desire to make the world a better place for human beings and others who coexist on the planet, you should also begin to follow this project’s development.

We carry on as we are … and it’s true, after all: tech did win the day the last time it happened; the last time we were here.

Copyright was disembowelled by the big search engines, who ripped classified advertising revenues from copyright owners such as newspapers, convincing these organisations that page impressions were where their futures lay, when in fact the revenues reverted to tech at the expense of the media organisations in question, because of the astonishing abuse by the tech sides of all these coins, re the legal figure that is “fair use”.

So we can repeat this history, and copyright will then be further weakened.

Or will it?

With search in mind, with the firming up of legislative measures around large online tech companies in Europe, and with some of the savvier legal minds realising that this is Search 2, who is to say that class action suits won’t begin to grow like generative AI’s own quite scary hallucinatory events?

Forget OpenAI for the moment (though not really). For the moment, it’s packed to the gills with lawyers. (Though this is also no done deal, even for them. Surely we can already begin to sense this.)

Let’s take the rest of the generative and related AI sectors, instead. Those of you who are reading this and are in the business of AI outwith the behemoths of the industry … turning your virtual lathes, achieving your growth step-by-step, and appealing every so often to investors, banks, and others for new funding: yes, people just like you.

Seeing it from a potential investor’s point of view, interested in the smaller, nimbler, focussed and niche startups the ecosystem has always made money out of, which approach in the future do you think such investors would find it easier to consider investing in?

1. An increasingly uncertain litigation-riven way of doing business, where every month brings increasingly juicy revenues but, at the same time, the ongoing promise of extraordinarily reputation-impacting high-profile court cases?

2. A litigation-free business model where your clients realise it’s easier and easier to see the AI services you are delivering as coming from the good guys, gals, and genders-all of modern big tech?

Our first business model canvas can be found here:

• Compensify Me business model canvas

It would, however, be utterly fabulous if ideas from generative AI proponents and practitioners, alongside those of owners of human-generated intellectual property, could find a common ground in this process and influence its outcomes.

And then we could “make your AI and everyone’s copyright a wholly collaborative and human-, planet- and socioeconomic-enhancing sector … to be proud of”.

But even if this isn’t the dynamic we get, we’re determined here at Compensify Me to ensure copyright doesn’t only not die but actually enjoys a new lease of … right!

Who'd want to partner on this? I can't see any traditional publisher in any sector except tech saying no. Image publishers too, ranging from photography and painting to digital art and representations of real-world installations.

Also, legal firms specialising in #intellectualproperty matters would be the very first onboard if a solid business structure could quickly be put in place.

Finally, #copyright-tracking and #plagiarism-detecting platforms across academia, the media and suchlike would find Compensify Me an ideal place to deepen their current praxis.

It then occurs to me that some tech companies might want to provide the tools that would enable all this.

We'd need #blockchain for sure for the multiple attribution stamps for the creators whose content formed the basis of insights, outcomes and new auto-generated content.

We'd also need the most robust #invoicing and #payment systems on the planet for the absolute foreseeable.

That's a lot of tech which would benefit from breaking ranks, isn't it?