[Retric]

> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid.

Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.

Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.

[bjterry]

For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!

[nneonneo]

The people in that counting to infinity subreddit would get compensated a lot if this were fully automated - their posts were so overrepresented in the training set that many of their usernames became complete tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp).

[Retric]

I object to calling people chatting online artists.

However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.

[numpad0]

I think the lower bounds of someone signing away rights to their whole art portfolio is more towards $1m than few thousands. Few k is just a month's salary that they can "make" themselves. Offers that small would be almost off-putting.

[Retric]

That would be true if they gained the exclusive ability to reproduce works etc.

AI companies want a license to train not ownership of a portfolio.

[abustamam]

Hey finally my reddit and hn habit can be lucrative!

[numpad0]

There are definitely >1m artists worldwide, some popular some less so, and $1M * 1m =1T, not 0.1% * 200T =200B.

Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".

[Retric]

This isn’t ownership it’s a license.

I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.

Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.

[numpad0]

> Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary.

Didn't that exact social experiment took place in the US last year? I thought the result of that was disastrous if media reports are to be believed.

OTOH I remember creator of Wordle closed the "low few mil" deal instantly, so I do believe it unlikely that people turn down few _hundred_ months worth of salary. But those artists are not from regions with 50-100x less median income and/or wider income distribution relative to US - I think they're concentrated in relatively high-income-low-disparity regions - so I don't think there's backwater wherever that lifetime income there is equivalent to no more than 6 months worth in US that has abundant supply of artists.

And IMO those artists are basically engaged in a geo-scale dumping of media contents. It's the same phenomenon as how moving consumer electronics manufacturing to US instantly multiply costs by small integers instead of just incurring premiums in percentages. If that phenomenon were to be quenched and those effects were integrated into economy anyhow, that will change the global balances of power to some statistically significant degrees, like, we'd be seeing flying rocket amphibian McBoatfaces everywhere. That might be interesting, but I'm not sure if that's an interesting kind of an interesting thing to see.

[Retric]

Wordle involved actually selling the rights to something not just allowing AI to be trained on it while he kept the website.

That’s really not a reasonable comparison to what is being sought.

As to global artists, I was suggesting the majority of artists globally make ~20k USD or less per year as artists. To get to millions of artists you need to use a generous definition, so now Hollywood is full of actors how many of them made 20+k last year as an actor? If you disagree fine let’s double it and 6 months salary is still only 20k and would I suspect be a seriously tempting offer when you retain all rights to past and future works.